alt Hacker NewsWhat's the human baseline? How many cats does a human need to see to learn what a cat is, vs an AI?
Maybe not quite a fair comparison since my human brain has been "learning" for half a billion years before I was born.
I wonder if there's an equivalent of that for AI. Evolving the architectures?
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sdpmas • today at 12:21 AM
i think evolution meta-learns the architecture, hyperparams. some domain knowledge too (for ex, we all perceive the world as 3d) but not much. if you compare the text consumed by human vs AI (and i think this is fair b/c even with evolution text is a pretty recent invention for humans), the gap is many orders of magnitude.
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The human genome contains around 1.5GB of information and DeepSeek v3 weighs in at around 800GB, so it's a bit apples-to-oranges. As you say, what's been evolved over hundreds of millions of years is the learning apparatus and architecture, but we largely learn online from there (with some built-in behaviours like reflexes). It's a testament to the robustness of our brains that the overwhelming majority of humans learn pretty effectively. I suspect LLM training runs are substantially more volatile (as well as suffering from the obvious data efficiency issues).
If you'd like an unsolicited recommendation, 'A Brief History of Intelligence' by Max Bennett is a good, accessible book on this topic. It explicitly draws parallels between the brain's evolution and modern AI.