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Comment by wanderingmind | Hacker News Reader

Not just that the brain of a newborn comes pretrained with billions of years of evolution. There is an energy cost associated with that which must be taken into account

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Then you must also take that cost into account when calculating the cost of training LLMs, as well as the cost humans operating the devices and their respective individual brain development.

LLMs are always an additional cost, never more efficient because they add to the calculation, if you look at it that way.

Only if we are counting the cost to generate all the inputs to training, and not just the training itself - it just depends on the scope of the analysis.

(i.e. taken to the extreme, as humans learn from their environment, do we have to count all energy that has gone into creating the world as we know it?)

If taken to the extreme I can't help but quote Carl Sagan :-)

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe"

Well, LLMs also pressupose humans and evolution, since they needed us to create them, so their tally is even higher by definition...

Also take into consideration the speed of evolution. LLM training might be much faster because a lot of competition power is used for its training. Maybe if it was the same speed as evolution then it would take billions of years, too?

Also our brains and our language are co-optimised to be compatible.

ChatGPT has to deal with the languages we already created, it doesn't get to co-adapt.

Brains are only about half a billion years old.

Those are sunk costs

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