[rekrsiv]

On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection pressure.

Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower scale than we are and needs less energy to achieve anything. Coincidentally, our own progress has also been tied to the rate of shrinking of our toys.

[wat10000]

Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from "this multi-ton machine can do arithmetic operations on large numbers several times faster than a person" to "this box produces a convincing facsimile of human conversation, but it only emulates a trillion neurons and they're not nearly as sophisticated as real ones."

I do think we probably need a new hardware approach to get to the human level, but it does seem like it will happen in a relative blink of an eye compared to how long the brain took.

[Terr_]

> Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from

I dunno, whenever I leave the silicon technology alone with plenty of power and cooling, nothing changes. :p

If the effect requires the involvement of swarms of ancient nanobots, then maybe that's the hardware and software that really deserves the credit.

[rekrsiv]

But we don't even need a human brain. We already have those, they take months to grow, take forever to train, and are forever distracted. Our logic-based processes will keep getting smaller and less power hungry as we figure out how to implement them at even lower scales, and eventually we'll be able to solve problems with the same building blocks as evolution but in intelligent ways, of which LLMs will likely only play a minuscule part of the larger algorithms.