[snewman]

I think this is unlikely. There has never (in the visible fossil record) been a mutation that suddenly made tigers an order of magnitude stronger and faster, or humans an order of magnitude more intelligent. It's been a long time (if ever?) since chip transistor density made a multiple-order-of-magnitude leap. Any complex optimized system has many limiting factors and it's unlikely that all of them would leap forward at once. The current generation of LLMs are not as complex or optimized as tigers or humans, but they're far enough along that changing one thing is unlikely to result in a giant leap.

If and when something radically better comes along, say an alternative to back-propagation that is more like the way our brains learn, it will need a lot of scaling and refinement to catch up with the then-current LLM.

[the8472]

Comparing it to evolution and SNPs isn't really a good analogy. Novel network architectures are much larger changes, maybe comparable to new organelles or metabolic pathways? And those have caused catastrophic changes. Evolution also operates on much longer time-scales due to its blind parallel search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe