[Terr_]

> The function being approximated in an LLM is the mental process required to write like a human.

Quibble: That can be read as "it's approximating the process humans use to make data", which I think is a bit reaching compared to "it's approximating the data humans emit... using its own process which might turn out to be extremely alien."

[TeMPOraL]

Good point.

Then again, whatever process we're using, evolution found it in the solution space, using even more constrained search than we did, in that every intermediary step had to be non-negative on the margin in terms of organism survival. Yet find it did, so one has to wonder: if it was so easy for a blind, greedy optimizer to random-walk into human intelligence, perhaps there are attractors in this solution space. If that's the case, then LLMs may be approximating more than merely outcomes - perhaps the process, too.

[jayd16]

Its fuzzier than that. Something can be detrimental and survive as long as its not too detrimental. Plus there is the evolving meta that moves the goal posts constantly. Then there's the billions of years of compute...

[adrianN]

Negative mutations can survive for a long time if they're not too bad. For example the loss of vitamin C synthesis is clearly bad in situations where you have to survive without fresh food for a while, but that comes up so rarely that there was little selection pressure against it.

[wavemode]

An easy counterargument is that - there are millions of species and an uncountable number of organisms on Earth, yet humans are the only known intelligent ones. (In fact high intelligence is the only trait humans have that no other organism has.) That could perhaps indicate that intelligence is a bit harder to "find" than you're claiming.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

That humans are the only known intelligent ones is a very dubious statement. The most intelligent, sure, but several species of birds, great apes, and cetaceans all display significant intelligence.

[ben_w]

> The most intelligent, sure, but several species of birds, great apes, and cetaceans all display significant intelligence.

Relative to all other non-humans. If someone is reducing intelligence to a boolean, the threshold can of course go anywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone can get a dog to (technically) pass a GCSE (British highschool) exam (not full subject just exam) for a language other than English, because one dog learned a thousand words and that might just technically be enough for a British student to get a minimum pass in a French GCSE listening test.

But nobody sane ever hired a non human animal to solve a problem that humans consider intellectually challenging.

If intelligence is ability to learn from few examples, all mammals (and possibly all animals I'm not sure about insects) beat all machine learning and by a large margin. If it is the ability to learn a lot and synthesise combinations from those things, LLMs beat any one of us by a large margin and are only weak when compared to humanity as a whole rather than a specific human. If it is peak performance, narrow AI (non-LLM) beats us in a handfull of cases, as do non-human animals in some cases, while we beat all animals and all ML in the majority of things we care about.

Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.

[nextaccountic]

> If someone is reducing intelligence to a boolean, the threshold can of course go anywhere.

Indeed, it would be very surprising if multiple species had exactly the same intelligence. It's more likely there this variable samples some distribution. Of course the species at the top can set the threshold so that all other species don't meet it, if they feel like declaring themselves uniquely intelligent. But that's not very useful.

> Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.

Other great apes can drive too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY

I think it's very hard to look at this video and not recognize that orangutans are intelligent

[ben_w]

> Other great apes can drive too.

As can dogs. However, I said "peak".

[thrownthatway]

> if it was so easy

That’s one giant leap you got there.

That the probably that intelligent life exists in the universe is 1, says nothing about that ease, or otherwise, with which it came about.

By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.

Or, what did you mean by easy?

[TeMPOraL]

> By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.

We know how long it took. We have a good idea when life started, and for almost all its history, it was single-cellular. Multi-cellular life is relatively fresh, and on evolutionary time scales, the progression from first eukaryotes to something resembling a basic nervous systems to basic brains to humans, was fairly quick. We have many examples of animals alive today from every part of the progression, and we know they actively use it. We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.

All that adds up to, yes, it's surprising evolution stumbled on our level of intelligence so easily.

[thrownthatway]

> We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.

If you’re going to get about claiming to know how evolution works, at least know how evolution works:

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