Comment by visarga

If brain without language would suffice, a single human could rediscover all we know on their own. But it's not like that, brains are feeble individually, only in societies we have cultural evolution. If humanity lost language and culture and start from scratch, it would take us another 300K years to rediscover what we lost.

But if you train a random-init LLM on the same data, it responds (almost) like a human on a diversity of tasks. Does that imply humans are just language models on two feet? Maybe we are also language modelling our way through life. New situation comes up, we generate ideas based on language, select based on personal experience, and then act and observe the outcomes to update our preferences in the future.