The actual experiment is basically training a relatively large RNN (1000 units) to do a very simple copy-esque task. The weight values are constrained to be either positive or negative at the beginning of training. The RNN could probably be way smaller and still be made to solve this task.

It isn't even a spiking model.

It seems really hard to go from this experiment to "we've learned anything useful about how brains actually work."

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.17.562828v2....