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> Turboprop engines tell us nothing about how birds fly

That is not true.

Turboprop engines and flying birds are different things, but there is a set of common properties.

A blade of a screw propeller functions exactly in the same way as a flapping wing of a bird, except that the wing cannot rotate without limits around the body of the bird, so it must stop, change angles and revert the motion, while the blade can rotate continuously around the axis, functioning on one side like a falling wing and on the other side like a raising wing. The similarities between propeller blades and insect wings are even greater, because insect wings cannot change their shapes so much as those of birds.

For now, our understanding of the networks composed of the neurons of animals is much less advanced than our understanding of wings and propellers, which is why there is a much greater uncertainty about whether there are any similar mechanisms in biological neural networks and in LLMs.

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Also, AFAIK, insects rely on their (flat) flapping wings to create lift by creating vortices.

"Nothing" may be a little too strong -- physics is physics, after all -- but (small) birds and airplanes have Reynolds numbers about 1000x different and different underlying material science.

Airplanes are engineered (with a very small number of exceptions) to be stable during flight, whereas bird flight is inherently unstable, requiring a lot of specialized cognition so birds can fly.

I would think a lot of cognitive ornithologists (who I really hope exist!) would be interested in finding out about this.

At this point, I'm at the complete end of my knowledge of bird flight!

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We already know that the most basic mechanisms in ANN and actual neurons are very different. Spiking and neurotransmitters are basically everything in brains and don't exist in ANNs.
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ok, compare a wheel to a human leg. If you look long enough you will find similarities, but you honestly cannot say that you "understand how humans walk" when all you can do is put a man in a wheelbarrow, move it, and say "look! my device accomplishes the same task!"
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attention + residual seems kind of like Chomsky's merge operation.
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