[orthoxerox]

Two big ways in which human intelligence is different from LLM intelligence are:

1) human intelligence makes no sharp distinction between training and generation. Every time you ask a human a question it modifies its neural structure a little.

2) continuous operation: human intelligence deals with a continuous stream of multimedia data for sixteen hours a day and starts hallucinating when deprived of it.

There's also the fact that you can't branch or roll back human intelligence, but this is something most sci-fi novels tackle when discussing mind uploading first.

Are these two differences critical aspects of human intelligence or unfortunate limitations of its biological hardware? I do not know. If we somehow manage to simulate a human brain on silicon, we will get "computer" intelligence that learns like a human, but will we have to simulate the whole virtual world for it 16/7 and let it sleep for eight hours each day just to stop it from going mad?

Or will it be cheaper to fork and kill an uploaded math genius a billion times, pumping the same recycled sensory data into his or her mind, slipping a question into the auditory data, getting the answer and then switching the simulation off and trashing the copy? Will we consider this a bigger atrocity than doing the same to an LLM right now in 2026?