alt Hacker News> just an alternative optimization procedure
This "just" is... not-incorrect, but also not really actionable/relevant.
1. LLMs aren't a fully genetic algorithm exploring the space of all possible "neuron" architectures. The "social" capabilities we want may not be possible to acquire through the weight-based stuff going on now.
2. In biological life, a big part of that is detecting "thing like me", for finding a mate, kin-selection, etc. We do not want our LLM-driven systems to discriminate against actual humans in favor of similar systems. (In practice, this problem already exists.)
3. The humans involved making/selling them will never spend the necessary money to do it.
4. Even with investment, the number of iterations and years involved to get the same "optimization" result may be excessive.
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While I don't disagree about (2), my experience suggests that LLMs are biased towards generating code for future maintenance by LLMs. Unless instructed otherwise, they avoid abstractions that reduce repetitive patterns and would help future human maintainers. The capitalist environment of LLMs seems to encourage such traits, too.
(Apart from that, I'm generally suspect of evolution-based arguments because they are often structurally identical to saying “God willed it, so it must true”.)
Why should we think that pro-social capabilities are simply not expressible by weight-based ANN architectures?