[surfingdino]

The mouse would go mad, because libraries preserve more than just knowledge, they preserve the evolution of it. That evolution is ongoing as we discover more about ourselves and the world we live in, refine our knowledge, disprove old assumptions and theories and, on occasion, admit that we were wrong to dismiss them. Also, over time, we place different levels of importance to knowledge from the past. For example, an old alchemy manual from the middle ages used to record recipes for a cure for some nasty disease was important because it helped whoever had access to it quickly prepare some ointment that sometimes worked, but today we know that most of those recipes were random, non-scientific attempts at coming up with a solution to a medical problem and we have proven that those medicines do not work. Therefore, the importance of the old alchemist's recipe book as a source of scientific truth has gone to zero, but the historic importance of it has grown a lot, because it helps us understand how our knowledge of chemistry and its applications in health care has evolved. LLMs treat all text as equal unless it will be given hints. But those hints are provided by humans, so there is an inherent bias and the best we can hope for is that those hints are correct at the time of training. We are not pursuing AGI, we are pursuing the goal of automating the process of creation of answers that look like they are the right answers to the given question, but without much attention to factual, logical, or contextual correctness.

[immibis]

No. The mouse would just be a mouse. It wouldn't learn anything, because it's a mouse. It might chew on some of the books. Meanwhile, transformers do learn things, so there is obviously more to it than just the quantity of data.

(Why spend a mouse? Just sit a strawberry in a library, and if the hypothesis holds that the quantity of data is the only thing that matters holds, you'll have a super intelligent strawberry)

[AlexandrB]

> Meanwhile, transformers do learn things

That's the question though, do they? One way of looking at gen AI is as a highly efficient compression and search. WinRAR doesn't learn, neither does Google - regardless of the volume of input data. Just because the process of feeding more data into gen AI is named "learning" doesn't mean that it's the same process that our brains undergo.

[immibis]

To the extent that we know what learning is (not very!) yes they do.

[lgas]

No need to waste a strawberry. Just test the furniture in the library. Either you have super intelligent chairs and tables or not.

[ghostzilla]

Or a pebble; for a super intelligent pebble.

“God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.” ― Ibn Arabi