How did language develop its rich, complex properties and what led to your epiphany about language’s nature? Elan framed a recent realization that language may possess an internal, self-generative structure revealed by large language models. He argued that modern language models work by learning statistical relations in sequences rather than by possessing external world knowledge or reference. Elan proposed that human speech may be language “running on its own,” with the speaker acting mainly as a prompt to an internal informational system. He reported conducting computational and empirical work over the past ~18 months to test and develop this intuition about language. Elan suggested language likely evolved from preexisting biological sequence-generating mechanisms rather than appearing de novo in humans. He proposed music as a possibly purer au ...