Any recent work on backpropagation-less neural networks?

I recall 2 years ago Hinton published a paper on Forward-Forward networks which use a contrastive strategy to do ML on MNIST.

I'm wondering if there has been any progress on that front? Have there been any backprop-free versions of language models, image recognition, etc?


It seems like this is a pretty important unexplored area of ML given that it seems unlikely that the human brain does backprop...

backpropagation deeplearning etc free front hinton image image recognition important language language models mnist networks neural networks paper progress recall recognition strategy versions work