Tamay Besiroglu

I think the reason why there is such a big gap

discontinuity between animals and humans is because animals have to rely entirely on natural world data, basically, to train themselves.

Like, imagine that the only thing as a human that you saw was that nobody talked to you, you didn't read anything, you just had to learn by experience, maybe to some extent by imitating other people, but you have no explicit communication.

Well, it would be very inefficient.

Like what's actually happening is that you have this, I think some other people have made this point as well, is that evolution is sort of this outer optimizer that's like improving the software efficiency of the brain in a bunch of ways.

There's some genetic knowledge that you inherit, not that much because there isn't that much space in the genome.

And then you have this lifetime learning, which is you don't actually see that much data during lifetime learning.

A lot of this is redundant and so on.

So what seems to have changed with humans compared to other animals is that humans became able to have culture.

And they have language, which enables them to, like—

have a much more efficient training data modality compared to animals.

They also have, I think, stronger ways in which they tend to imitate other humans and learn from their skills.

So that also enables this knowledge to be passed on.

I think animals are pretty bad at that compared to humans.

So basically, as a human, you're just being trained on much more efficient data.

And that creates further insights to be then efficient at learning from it.

And then that creates this feedback loop where

The selection pressure gets much more intense.

So I think that's roughly what happened with humans.

But a lot of the capabilities that you need to be like a good worker in the human economy, animals already have.