I would imagine the baseline assumption of your thinking is that things like sleep and emotions are a 'bug' in terms of cognition (or at the very least, 'prompts' that are optional).
Said differently, the assumption is that with the right engineer, you could reach human-parity cognition with a model that doesn't sleep or feel emotions (after all what's the point of an LLM if it gets tired and doesn't want to answer your questions sometimes? Or even worse knowingly deceives you because it is mad at you or prejudiced against you).
The problem with that assumption is that as far as we can tell, every being with even the slightest amount of cognition sleeps in some form and has something akin to emotional states. As far as we can prove, sleep and emotions are necessary preconditions to cognition.
A worldview where the 'good' parts of the brain (reasoning and logic) are replicated in LLM but the 'bad' parts (sleep, hunger, emotions, etc.) are not is likely an incomplete model.
Ah a very fun 'snippy' question that just proves my point further. Thank you.
No airplanes do not sleep. That's part of why their flying is fundamentally different than birds'.
You'll likely also notice that birds flap their wings while planes use jet engines and fixed wings.
My entire point is that it is foolish to imagine airplanes as mechanical birds, since they are in fact completely different and require their own mental models to understand.
This is analogous to LLMs. They do something completely different than what our brains do and require their own mental models in order to understand them completely.
Here, it's actually fun to respond to your comment in another way, so let's try this out:
Yes, sleep is in fact a prerequisite to planes flying. We have very strict laws about it actually. Most planes are only able to fly because a human (who does sleep) is piloting it.
The drones and other vehicles that can fly without pilots were still programmed by a person (who also needed sleep) FWIW.
I would imagine the baseline assumption of your thinking is that things like sleep and emotions are a 'bug' in terms of cognition (or at the very least, 'prompts' that are optional).
Said differently, the assumption is that with the right engineer, you could reach human-parity cognition with a model that doesn't sleep or feel emotions (after all what's the point of an LLM if it gets tired and doesn't want to answer your questions sometimes? Or even worse knowingly deceives you because it is mad at you or prejudiced against you).
The problem with that assumption is that as far as we can tell, every being with even the slightest amount of cognition sleeps in some form and has something akin to emotional states. As far as we can prove, sleep and emotions are necessary preconditions to cognition.
A worldview where the 'good' parts of the brain (reasoning and logic) are replicated in LLM but the 'bad' parts (sleep, hunger, emotions, etc.) are not is likely an incomplete model.