Centaur: A Foundation Model for Human Cognition and the Dawn of In-Silico Psychology

AI introduces the Centaur model, a groundbreaking foundation model for human cognition that seeks to unify the fragmented field of cognitive science by merging artificial intelligence with decades of behavioral data. It outlines the model's architecture, built upon a pre-trained large language model (Llama 3.1 70B) fine-tuned with a vast natural language dataset of human choices (Psych-101), enabled by the efficient QLoRA training technique. The document details the model's rigorous validation, showcasing its ability to generalize to new individuals, tasks, and cognitive domains, even demonstrating neural alignment with human brain activity. Finally, it discusses the Centaur model's potential as a scientific discovery engine while also acknowledging its limitations, such as data biases and the "black box" problem, setting a roadmap for future research.