[AlexandrB]

> I've yet to see a mouse write even mediocre python, let alone a rap song about life in ancient Athens written in Latin.

Isn't this distinction more about "language" than "intelligence". There are some fantastically intelligent animals, but none of them can do the tasks you mention because they're not built to process human languages.

[ben_w]

Prior to LLMs, language was what "proved" humans were "more intelligent" than animals.

But this is besides the point; I have no doubt that if one were to make a mouse immortal and give it 50,000 years experience of reading the internet via a tokeniser that turned it into sensory nerve stimulation and it getting rewards depending on how well it can guess the response, it would probably get this good sooner simply because organic minds seem to be better at learning than AI.

But mice aren't immortal and nobody's actually given one that kind of experience, whereas we can do that for machines.

Machines can do this because they can (in some senses but not all) compensate for the sample-inefficient by being so much faster than organic synapses.

[dgb23]

I agree with the general sentiment but want to add: Dogs certainly process human language very well. From anecdotal experience of our dogs:

In terms of spoken language they are limited, but they surprise me all the time with terms they have picked up over the years. They can definitely associate a lot of words correctly (if it interests them) that we didn't train them with at all, just by mere observation.

A LLM associates bytes with other bytes very well. But it has no notion of emotion, real world actions and reactions and so on in relation to those words.

A thing that dogs are often way better than even humans is reading body language and communicating through body language. They are hyper aware of the smallest changes in posture, movement and so on. And they are extremely good at communicating intent or manipulate (in a neutral sense) others with their body language.

This is a huge, complex topic that I don't think we really fully understand, in part because every dog also has individual character traits that influence their way of communicating very much.

Here's an example of how complex their communication is. Just from yesterday:

One of our dogs is for some reason afraid of wind. I've observed how she gets spooked by sudden movements (for example curtains at an open window).

Yesterday it was windy and we went outside (off leash in our yard), she was wary and showed subtle fear and hesitated to move around much. The other dog saw that and then calmly got closer to her, posturing towards the same direction she seemed to go. He made small very steps forward, waited a bit, let her catch up and then she let go of the fear and went sniffing around.

This all happened in a very short amount of time, a few seconds, there is a lot more to the communication that would be difficult and wordy to explain. But since I got more aware of these tiny movements (from head to tail!) I started noticing more and more extremely subtle clues of communication, that can't even be processed in isolation but typically require the full context of all movements, the pacing and so on.

Now think about what the above example all entails. What these dogs have to process, know and feel. The specificity of it, the motivations behind it. How quickly they do that and how subtle their ways of communications are.

Body language is a large part of _human_ language as well. More often than not it gives a lot of context to what we speak or write. How often are statements misunderstood because it is only consumed via text. The tone, rhythm and general body language can make all the difference.