In what sense is the relationship between neurons and human function more “meaningful” than the relationship between matrices and LLM function?
You’re correct that LLMs are probably a dead end with respect to AGI, but this is completely the wrong reason.
Organic neural networks are pretty energy efficient in comparison- although still decently inefficient compared to other body systems - so there is the capacity to build things out to the scale required, assuming my read on what's going on there is correct, that is. So it's not clear to me that the energy inefficiency of ANNs can be sufficiently resolved to enable these multiple quasi-independent subsystems to be built at the scale required. Not even if these interesting looking trinomial neural nets which are matrix addition based rather than multiplication come to dominate the ANN scene.
While I was thinking this comment through I realised there's a possible interpretation wherin human activity induced climate change is an emergent property of the relative energy inefficiency of neural architecture.