Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

OK, so we're basically talking about different things. I'm talking about building something that has animal/human intelligence and learning capability, and would be able to first learn language for itself (no pre-trainiing), and then proceed from there.

You're talking about building an "alien" intelligence, apparently something based on an LLM, where language is baked in from the start and can therefore be used as the basis of some type of learning (or at least memorization).

Sure an LLM can be super-human at specifc things like math where the traditional computer strengths of compute, memory, etc apply, but in the context of AGI (generality, not a bag of narrow intelligences) you can't call something super-human if it can't at least also do the majority of things that a human can do, and not having learning ability as powerful as a human seems to me to be a pretty massive omission.

If WE didn't have ability to learn language, then we'd not be here talking about it, and there would be no LLMs. Having a fundamental ability to learn, isn't just useful to learn language from scratch, or for learning all the non-linguistic skills a human is capable of, but would also support an AI that can learn things that we cannot (e.g. could give it additional "senses" like global pressure/temperature inputs so it could "see" the weather and learn global patterns).