alt Hacker News"Parallel" evolution is just different branches of the same evolutionary tree. The most distantly related naturally evolved lifeforms are more similar to each other than an LLM is to a human. The LLM did not evolve at all.
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Kim_Bruning • yesterday at 11:24 PM
> The LLM did not evolve at all.
Evolution and Transormer training are 'just' different optimization algorithms. Different optimizers obviously can produce very comparable results given comparable constraints.
orbital-decay • yesterday at 10:53 PM
The training process shares a lot of high-level properties with the biological evolution.
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Evolution is the way how the "mechanism" came to be, which is indeed very different. But the mechanism itself - spiking neurons and neurotransmitters on one hand vs matrix multiplications and nonlinear functions (both "inspired" by our understanding of neurons) don't seem so different, at least not on a fundamental level.
What is different for sure is the time dimension: Biological brains are continuous and persistent, while LLMs only "think" in the space between two tokens, and the entire state that is persisted is the context window.