Really?
How will they do this as we don't really know how a brain works?
Loads of creatures are intelligent, some by inference of human biased tests appear to be self-aware. Many animals including crows, bees and primates have vocabulary, but so far only humans seem to have language. See Chomsky. Some have claimed parrots or chimps are communicating using language, but independent experts have not verified any language skills, only vocabulary. Language lets you construct new ideas which can be tested or simply entertain.
Also the coarse structure is one thing, but how that actually works is different. Also a computer neural network is a sort of dataflow HW & SW distributed implementation and not much like biological neurons which are only part of a brain. A fruit fly has about 100,000 neurons. A human has about 90 billion neurons. But neurons are only one part of brain structure. You might fit the structure of a fruit fly on a chip using billions of transistors. Except we don't have enough detail on even how that works to "copy and paste" it on a chip.
This is simply research and has very little to do with how a biological brain works.
"Although neurons are often described of as "fundamental units" of the brain, they perform internal computations. Neurons integrate input within dendrites, and this complexity is lost in models that assume neurons to be a fundamental unit. Dendritic branches can be modeled as spatial compartments, whose activity is related due to passive membrane properties, but may also be different depending on input from synapses. Compartmental modelling of dendrites is especially helpful for understanding the behavior of neurons that are too small to record with electrodes, as is the case for [the fruit fly]"
This is not really what they claim it is.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
