One thing that keeps me up at night is that the human genome is only 3 giga base pairs, of which only a fraction encodes the design of our brains — and quite inefficiently at that, through layers of indirections.

That’s sufficient information to produce a system that can learn to think like us! Not just learn but efficiently, with far less input data needed than any current LLM. Literally just a couple of decades of video and audio, only a small fraction of that text!

From what I can tell, the human brain achieves this through scale alone. There’s nothing else that can explain the observed learning capability. The genome is too small to encode learned weights, and we don’t clone our parents’s brains in development.

It’s possible, and a meat computer can do it. Replicating this in silicon is just a matter of time, and it might require only scale and nothing else.