Comment by GoblinSlayer
4 days ago
>Most of evolution was us running around just killing stuff and eating and having sex.
Tell Boston Dynamics how to do that.
Mice inherited brain from their ancestors. You might think you don't need a working brain to reason about math, but that's because you don't know how thinking works, it's argument from ignorance.
You've missed the point entirely.
People argue that humans have had the equivalent of training a frontier LLM for billions of years.
But training a frontier LLM involves taking multiple petabytes of data, effectively all of recorded human knowledge and experience, every book ever written, every scientific publication ever written, all of known maths, science, encylopedias, podcasts, etc. And then training that for millions of years worth of GPU-core time.
You cannot possibly equate human evolution with LLM training, it's ridiculous.
Our "training" time didn't involve any books, maths, science, reading, 99.9999% of our time was just in the physical world. So you can quite rationally argue that our brains ability to learn without training is radically better and more efficient that the training we do for LLMs.
Us running around in the jungle wasn't training our brain to write poetry or compose music.
> Us running around in the jungle wasn't training our brain to write poetry or compose music.
This is a crux of your argument, you need to justify it. It sounds way off base to me. Kinda reads like an argument from incredulity.
No, I think what he said was true. Human brains have something about them that allow for the invention of poetry or music. It wasn't something learned through prior experience and observation because there aren't any poems in the wild. You might argue there's something akin to music, but human music goes far beyond anything in nature.
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So you're arguing that "running around in the jungle" is equivalent to feeding the entirety of human knowledge in LLM training?
Are you suggesting that somehow there were books in the jungle, or perhaps boardgames? Perhaps there was a computer lab in the jungle?
Were apes learning to conjugate verbs while munching on bananas?
I don't think I'm suggesting anything crazy here... I think people who say LLM training is equivalent to "billions of years of evolution" need to justify that argument far more than I need to justify that running around in the jungle is equivalent to mass processing petabytes of highly rich and complex dense and VARIED information.
One year of running around in the same patch of jungle, eating the same fruit, killing the same insects, and having sex with the same old group of monkeys isn't going to be equal to training with the super varied, complete, entirety of human knowledge, is it?
If you somehow think it is though, I'd love to hear your reasoning.
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