Pretty sure it's not scale but sensors.
We have sensors for vision, sound, taste, temperature, texture, etc that are constantly observing the world and affecting not only our current behavior but changing us in real time.
We have sensors for vision, sound, taste, temperature, texture, etc that are constantly observing the world and affecting not only our current behavior but changing us in real time.
A gazelle just days(!) old can control its body and four legs sufficiently well to outrun a cheetah. This is a complex motor-control loop involving all of its senses. Compare that to Tesla's autopilot training system, which uses many millions of hours of training data and still struggles to move a car... slowly. The equivalent would be a training routine that can take just a handful of days of footage and produce an AI that can win a car race.
There's something magical about neural networks when scaled up to brain sizes. From what I gather, there's little else encoded in the genome except for the high-level pattern of wiring, the equivalent to the PyTorch model configuration.