Although I get that it's a metaphor, I really dislike the "some people are born with a GB300 while others have an L40S" part. Even as a joke, it ranks people like hardware tiers, which is dehumanising and uncomfortably close to eugenic language. On top of that, the analogy also breaks down if you try to implement it literally.
replyFor an LLM, you have clear stages of mostly feedforward computation over finite numbers and a perfect way to reconstruct the computation.
For meat, even if you model it under a purely Newtonian approximation, you need to simulate at least the immediate closed system around it which is continuous, thermodynamic, chemical and so on. You'd need to choose an arbitrary time step and update enormous amounts of coupled physical state to get an inexact simulation of a minimal slice of reality.
You would have a much harder time obtaining even a substrate-independent dead organism, comapred to LLMs that are already substrate-independent, which is basically what my notebook example shows.
Yes reality is non deterministic but we don’t know if you absolutely need to consider anything outside the immediate closed system for a reasonably close approximation given the same inputs. They can already repeatably (inexact of course) simulate muscular actions with the same stimuli like from Neuralink. Exact enough to let a paralyzed person draw with their mind.
replyYeah the last line is a cheap shot, possibly at myself.
Yeah, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment to replace parts of a brain with Neuralink-like devices until you have a fully digital brain, although I doubt it would end up anything like a current LLM.
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