My remedial guess is that the human mind is more efficient at the pattern recognition that LLMs excel at in their own right.
We can do a lot more with less data, exert less effort and come to a reasonably accurate conclusion.
LLMs can artificially reason, but it requires intricate software that took decades to develop to the standard that it's reached now, and computers that suck the earth of its resources at a hair-raising scale, and like you've mentioned a lot of data. A lot of data. Apparently the entire internet and then some on a carousel.
Intelligence is an innate faculty of man and man's measure of intelligence generally doesn't require that much, depending on what's expected of the man throughout the course of his life.
Because AI is a technology the expectations we place on it are way higher.
A manuscript with a few errors, blotches, misspellings, omissions, what have you, is excused. If your printer does the same thing for every four or five jobs, it's defective.
My initial comment was going to make an abstract reference to how human beings are pretty much wired for reasoning from the time that they're being breastfed, or at least reared in the clutch of their mother. It has something to do with the impression I've picked up of how the inheritance of a language, and subsequently literacy, starts with your mom—in ideal cases.
I don't know if this is a strike against humans in the whole argument for efficiency. But I don't think it does.
Computers don't have Moms. Go Moms.
Then maybe the other thing is that rules and relationships must be encoded in a special way. In LLM’s I assume rules are emergent, but maybe we have a specific rules engine that gets trained based on the emotional salience of what we read/hear.
Maybe another reason is what’s encoded in our DNA, which might imagine our brain structure is fundamentally designed for some of this stuff.