> They discovered the immobilised kitten's visual processing did not develop normally whereas the mobile kitten's did, suggesting that it's not just the sensory input, but it being feedback to some internal agency within the brain.
> I suspect the same thing would be true for attempts to develop AGI...
On the other hand, I would not be surprised if this did _not_ generalize and translate to LLMs. Biological entities on earth tend to have tons of fairly arbitrary developmental legacy which may or may not translate well to an artificial one. In the experiment, they didn't make billions of clones of the cat with a variety of different parameters and check which one worked, they just observed that yes, this standard v1 cat has some specific hard-wired developmental tendencies. It is not surprising that taking it out of the environment it was evolved for messes things up, but I would not take the extra step that this means that something is essential in general.