> 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.

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.

There is no equivalency, only contributing factors. One cannot deny that our evolutionary history has contributed to our current capacity, probably in ways that are difficult to perceive unless you're an anthropologist.

Language is one mode of expression, and humans have many. This is another factor that makes humans so effective. To be honest, I would say that physical observation is far more powerful than all the bodies of text, because it is comprehensive and can respond to interaction. But that is merely my opinion.

No-one should be arguing that an LLM training corpus is the same as evolution. But information comes in many forms.

You're comparing the hyper specific evolution of 1 individual (an AI system) to the more general evolution of the entire human species (billions of individuals). It's as if you're forgetting how evolution actually works - natural selection - and forgetting that when you have hundreds of billions of individuals over thousands of years that even small insights gained from "running around in the jungle" can compound in ways that are hard to conceptualize.

I'm saying that LLM training is not equivalent to billions of years of evolution because LLMs aren't trained using evolutionary algorithms; there will always be fundamental differences. However, it seems reasonable to think that the effect of that "training" might be more or less around the same level.

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.

We have an intrinsic (and strange) reward system for creating new things, and it's totally awesome. LLMs only started to become somewhat useful once researchers tried to tap in to that innate reward system and create proxies for it. We definitely have not succeeded in creating a perfect mimicry of that system though, as any alignment researcher would no doubt tell you.