Is a brain also inference? I know that an LLM works very different from the brain, but I wonder what makes a brain more capable of thinking. Is it the long term context? Is it a different type of neuron activation?
Not likely. Take with whatever grain of salt you'd like, but that was largely a property of development being academicized and subject to things like grant cycles, research topic fashionability trends, and institutional structure. It would be wrong to assume it's some baked in thing that's guaranteed to happen independent of how development looks.