alt Hacker NewsGood point.
Then again, whatever process we're using, evolution found it in the solution space, using even more constrained search than we did, in that every intermediary step had to be non-negative on the margin in terms of organism survival. Yet find it did, so one has to wonder: if it was so easy for a blind, greedy optimizer to random-walk into human intelligence, perhaps there are attractors in this solution space. If that's the case, then LLMs may be approximating more than merely outcomes - perhaps the process, too.
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Negative mutations can survive for a long time if they're not too bad. For example the loss of vitamin C synthesis is clearly bad in situations where you have to survive without fresh food for a while, but that comes up so rarely that there was little selection pressure against it.
An easy counterargument is that - there are millions of species and an uncountable number of organisms on Earth, yet humans are the only known intelligent ones. (In fact high intelligence is the only trait humans have that no other organism has.) That could perhaps indicate that intelligence is a bit harder to "find" than you're claiming.
> if it was so easy
That’s one giant leap you got there.
That the probably that intelligent life exists in the universe is 1, says nothing about that ease, or otherwise, with which it came about.
By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.
Or, what did you mean by easy?
Its fuzzier than that. Something can be detrimental and survive as long as its not too detrimental. Plus there is the evolving meta that moves the goal posts constantly. Then there's the billions of years of compute...