Dwarkesh Patel

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.

Whereas humans, you know, like we have hands that like reward being able to learn how to do tool use, we can externalize digestion, more energy to the brain, and that kicks off the flywheel.

The way Byrne put it is the reason it was so hard is it's a very tight line between being in a situation where something is so important to learn and

that it's not just worth distilling the exact right circuits directly back into your DNA versus it's not important enough to learn at all.

It has to be something which is like, you have to incentivize building the algorithm to learn