Comment by suddenlybananas
5 days ago
Do you think evolutionary pressures are the best explanation for why humans were able to posit the Poincaré conjecture and solve it? While our mental architecture evolved over a very long time, we still learn from miniscule amounts of data compared to LLMs.
Yeah. What else would it be ? A brain capable of doing that was clearly the result of evolutionary pressures.
But there is no evolutionary pressure for the Poincaré conjecture, we were never optimized for that in particular, unlike these kinds of LLMs.
We were optimized to rapidly adapt to changing environments by solving the problems that arise through tool-making and cooperation in complex multi-stage tasks (like say hunting that mammoth to make clothing out of it). It turns out that the cheapest evolutionary pathway to get there has some interesting emergent phenomena.
Of course it is evolution. What else could it be?