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snemvaltstoday at 5:09 AM4 repliesview on HN

The ability to learn and infer without absorbing millions of books and all text on internet really does make us special. And only at 20 watts!


Replies

famouswafflestoday at 5:35 AM

Last I checked humans didn't pop into existence doing that. It happened after billions of years of brute force, trial and error evolution. So well done for falling into the exact same trap the OP cautions. Intelligence from scratch requires a mind boggling amount of resources, and humans were no different.

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virgildotcodestoday at 11:15 AM

We have a tremendous amount of raw information flowing through our brains 24/7 from before we are born, from the external world through all our senses and from within our minds as it attempts to make sense of that information, make predictions, generally reason about our existence, hallucinate alternative realities, etc. etc.

If you were able to somehow capture all that information in full detail as you've had access to by the age of say 25, it would likely dwarf the amount of information in millions of books by several orders of magnitude.

When you are 25 years old and are presented a strange looking ball and told to throw it into a strange looking basket for the first time. You are relying on an unfathomable amount of information turned into knowledge and countless prior experiments that you've accumulated/exercised to that point relating to the way your body and the world works.

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throw310822today at 7:55 AM

To be fair, the knowledge embedded in an LLM is also, at this point, a couple orders of magnitude (at least) larger than what the average human being can retain. So it's not like all those books and text in the internet are used just to bring them to our level, they go way beyond.

stavrostoday at 9:28 AM

Most people have absorbed way too few books to be able to infer properly. Hell, most people are confused by TV remotes.