Our brains killed us if we figured things out wrong. We’d get eaten. We learned to get things right enough, and how to be pretty right, fast, even when we didn’t know the new context (plants, animals, snow, lava).

LLM’s are just so happy to generate enough tokens that look right ish. They need so many examples driven into them during training.

The map is not the territory, and we’re training them on the map of our codified outputs. They don’t actually have to survive. They’re pretty amazing but of course they’re absolutely not doing what we do, because success for us and them look so different. We need to survive.

(Please can we not have one that really wants to survive.)