"Parallel" evolution is just different branches of the same evolutionary tree. The most distantly related naturally evolved lifeforms are more similar to each other than an LLM is to a human. The LLM did not evolve at all.
replyEvolution is the way how the "mechanism" came to be, which is indeed very different. But the mechanism itself - spiking neurons and neurotransmitters on one hand vs matrix multiplications and nonlinear functions (both "inspired" by our understanding of neurons) don't seem so different, at least not on a fundamental level.
replyWhat is different for sure is the time dimension: Biological brains are continuous and persistent, while LLMs only "think" in the space between two tokens, and the entire state that is persisted is the context window.
> The LLM did not evolve at all.
replyEvolution and Transormer training are 'just' different optimization algorithms. Different optimizers obviously can produce very comparable results given comparable constraints.
The training process shares a lot of high-level properties with the biological evolution.
reply"Minimize training loss while isolated from the environment" is not at all similar to "maximize replication of genes while physically interacting with the environment". Any human-like behavior observed from LLMs is built on such fundamentally alien foundations that it can only be unreliable mimicry.
replyThe environment for the model is its dataset and training algorithms. It's literally a model of it, in the same sense we are models of our physical (and social) environment. Human-like behavior is of course too specific, but highest level things like staged learning (pretraining/posttraining/in-context learning) and evolutionary/algorithmic pressure are similar enough to draw certain parallels, especially when LLM's data is proxying our environment to an extent. In this sense the GP is right.
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