[gary_0]

That's how the brain evolved, after all: take incoming input, process according to previous patterns, output a reaction to peripheral nervous system that will enhance survival. The evolutionary purpose of a cortex is to store a statistical model of an animal's environment based on past stimulus. Human intelligence is just a complicated permutation of these initial systemic parameters.

[fnordpiglet]

That’s why people have to take courses in reasoning and logic to be able to successfully apply it. It’s not like reasoning and logic are natural human skills. They’re learned through reinforcement learning by repeatedly exposing our brain to patterns again and again until we can train our stochastic expectation juice to not hallucinate an answer.

[gary_0]

And it takes ~20 years to train a new brain so it can coherently answer questions about a wide variety of topics. Even worse, you can't even copy-paste it once you're done!

[layer8]

It arguably needs much less training data though.

[rbanffy]

What we shouldn't is anthropomorphise it too much. While LLMs can express themselves and interact with us in natural language, their minds are very different from ours - they never learned by having an embodied self, and they can't continuously learn and adapt the way we do - once the conversation is over, it's like it never existed unless it's captured for a future training cycle.

Right now, their ability to learn is severely limited. And, yet, they outcompete us quite easily in a lot of different tasks.

[gary_0]

Agreed. There are a hundred different kinds of information processing that go into a human-like mind, and we've kinda-sorta built one piece. And there are a lot of pieces that it would neither be sane nor useful to build (eg. internalized emotions), so we might not see an AI with all the pieces for a very long time ("never" is probably too much to hope for).

[rbanffy]

It's amusing that our first contact with a completely alien intelligence is with one of our own making.

[satvikpendem]

How? Organisms with brains process every second of their life, is that not training data on a level comparable with current AI models?

[layer8]

From a pure data amount point of view yes, but relatively little of that would seem to be relevant for our intellectual capacities. If GPT was a robot moving autonomously around in the world with full visual, auditory and tactile apparatus, it may be a bit different.

[satvikpendem]

Hm, not sure how most of that data would be irrelevant, could you clarify? I think all of that data as well as interacting with the environment creates the level of knowledge and intelligence we have today.