They are less specialized than brains, but compensate millions of years of evolutionary adaptation with a larger corpus of text, about the same size as 11,000 people use in their lifetime, assuming 1B words/human.
Interestingly, humans needed 10 million times more text for cultural evolution, based on an estimate of 110 billion humans who ever lived.
So making progress is millions of times harder than catching up.
Could you provide source, where exists this 10 million times more text?
- Text which is not stored on some material carrier is just forgotten.
Largest old text system I know is Confucianism. It is huge, but very far from 10 million times 1B.
Other known text systems are all much smaller than Confucianism.
Now, the training set of GPT-4 was around 14T tokens, let's say 10T words. If you divide them you get around 10 million.
But why do you think that all 110B individuals have made significant contribution to overall intelligence?
I think, at best case, in every generation exists few significant contributors, but all others are just carriers of genome diversity and nothing more, and all they have done, just disappear as a breath of wind.
So, for 200k years, if one generation 40 years, will be just 5000 generations, ok, lets consider significant 1000 persons from each generation, will be just 5millions, 5 magnitudes less than your estimation, and BTW much closer to known estimations of humanity knowledge and size of datasets used to train largest existing models.
Plus, they have thousands of multimedia carriers (cinema, music, etc) and one time was archived all tweets for history preservation.
But all multimedia and tweets are much less volume than texts, but added few additional dimensions, hard to express with text.