Dwarkesh Patel

Are you more or less surprised as a result that evolution just sort of spontaneously stumbled upon it?

Okay, so there's actually a couple of interesting follow-ups.

If you buy the Sun perspective, that actually the crux of intelligence is animal intelligence.

What the quote he said is, if you got to the squirrel, you'd be most of the way to AGI.

Then we got to squirrel intelligence, I guess, right after the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago.

It seems like what instigated that was the oxygenation event 600 million years ago.

But immediately, the sort of like intelligence algorithm was there to like make the squirrel intelligence, right?

So...

It's suggestive that animal intelligence was like that.

As soon as you had the oxygen in the environment, you had the Ecuriot, you could just like get the algorithm.

Maybe there was like sort of an accident that evolution stumbled upon it so fast, but I don't know if that suggests it's actually quite, at the end, going to be quite simple.

A former guest, Guern, and also Carl Schulman, have made a really interesting point about that, which is their perspective is that the scalable algorithm which humans have and primates have arose in birds as well, and maybe other times as well.

But humans found an evolutionary niche which rewarded marginal increases in intelligence.

And also had a scalable brain algorithm that could achieve those increases in intelligence.

And so, for example, if a bird had a bigger brain, it would just, like, collapse out of the air.

So it's very smart for the size of its brain, but it's, like, it's not in a niche which rewards the brain getting bigger.

Yeah.

Maybe similar with some really smart— Like dolphins, et cetera.

Exactly, yeah.

Yeah.