[cameronh90]

I was being slightly facetious in parts. The point I was driving at is that a human mind has had a very long time to do something perhaps akin to hyperparameter tuning, and we know that even imperceptibly minor changes in brain architecture can be the difference between struggling to put your socks on and being a genius that’ll be remembered through the ages. So those 500M years since the first neuron can’t just be written off.

Ultimately I agree with your final conclusion. You can’t really compare a LLM and evolved human directly. Even just a neuron in an ANN is nothing remotely comparable to a biological neuron. Of course it isn’t surprising that humans and LLMs are different given that they are built to do completely different things on fundamentally different hardware.

It just seems like many people are keen to write off the significance of GPT just because it’s not yet quite as good at everything compared to the world’s most marvellous example of engineering we all have in our skull. We didn’t even have transistors 75 years ago, but now we have a pretty believable facsimile (until you really interrogate it) of human intelligence that’s improving million times faster than evolution was ever capable of. But now the criticism is that it learns in a fundamentally different way to humans and doesn’t generalise fast enough. It’s true, but.. really?