Comment by davebren
5 hours ago
Yes, we do. Humans share the statistical association ability that LLMs possess, but also conscious meaning and understanding. This is a difference in kind and means that we can generalize beyond the statistical pattern associations that we've extracted from data, so we don't require trillions of examples to develop knowledge.
Theoretically a human could sit alone in a dark room, knowing nothing of mathematics and come up with numbers, arithmetic algebra, etc...
They don't need to read every math textbook, paper, and online discussion in existence.
The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think we know, so we can't say either way.
In your example, would the human have ever had contact with other humans, or would it be placed in the room as a baby with no further input?
Our DNA does contain our pre-training, though. It's not true that we're an entirely blank slate.
Pre-training is not a good term if you are trying to compare it to LLM pre-training. Closer would be the model's architecture and learning algorithms which has been designed through decades of PhD research, and my point on that is that the differences are still much greater than the similarities.