This comparison is absolute nonsense.

"How could a telescope see saturn, human eyes have billions of years of evolution behind them, and we only made telescopes a few hundred years ago, so they should be much weaker than eyes"

"How can StockFish play chess better than a human, the human brain has had billions of years of evolution"

Evolution is random, slow, and does not mean we arrive at even a local optima.

They're not saying that LLMs should be better than smart teenagers; they're saying that smart teenagers can solve some problems without needing massive amounts of data, so apparently those problems are technically solvable without those amounts of data.

Yes. It is astonishing that LLMs can solve problems that only a handful of very smart teenagers can solve, but LLMs do it by consuming a million times as much content as those teenagers. Running out of data is not a reason for despair.

Also consider that during training LLMs spend much less time on processing, say, TAOCP (Knuth), or SICP (Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman), or Probability Theory (Jaynes) than on the entirety that is r/Frugal.

20 thick books turn a smart teenager into a graduate with a MSc. That's what, 10 million tokens?

When we read difficult, important texts, we reflect on them, make exercises, discuss them, etc. We don't know how to make an LLM do that in a way that improves it. Yet.

What comparison? I was arguing against a comparison.

humans arent born with memories you numpty

They're born with neural hardware whose architecture has been optimized by evolution. Any choice of architecture imparts some inductive bias, making some problems easier and some problems harder to learn, and humans have the advantage that people with bad architectures (those not matching properties of the world we live in) were more likely to die or to not mate.

You're right that we don't call those inherited thought patterns memories; we call them reflexes, emotions, region-specific brain functions, etc.

This is such a wildly misleading statement that it borders on straight up incorrect.

you mean its wrong? or would that not have made you feel as clever?

Neural precursor cells literally move themselves from where they first differentiate to their final location to ensure specific neural structures and information dynamics in the developed brain. It's not declarative memory, but its a memory of the neural architecture etched out over evolutionary time.

To be fair, GPT-5 didn't start off as a blank slate. The architecture probably encodes a lot, much like how DNA encodes a lot. The former requires human writing to decompress into a human-like thing, the latter requires the Earth environment and a woman to decompress into a human organism.

But it's indeed apples and oranges. There's no good way to estimate the information encoded by the GPT architecture compared to human DNA. We just have to be empirical and look at what the thing can do.