It's not DNA, it's embodiment in general. People learn an enormous amount in the process of existing and moving through space, and they hang all of their abstra

It's not DNA, it's embodiment in general. People learn an enormous amount in the process of existing and moving through space, and they hang all of their abstract knowledge on this framework. Related: it's a belief of mine that bodily symmetry is essential for cognition; having duplicate reflected forms that can imitate, work against, and coordinate with each other, like two hands, gives us the ability to imagine ourselves against the environment we're surrounded by. Seeing, sensing and being in full control of two things that are almost exactly the same, but are different (the two halves of one's body) gives us our first basis for the concept of comparison itself, and even of boundaries and the distinguishing of one thing from another. I believe this is almost the only function of external symmetry; since internally, and mostly away from sensory nerves, we're wildly asymmetrical. Our symmetry is the ignition for our mental processes. So I'm not in a DNA data wall camp, I'm in an embodiment data wall camp. And I believe that it will be solved by embodying things and letting them learn physical intuitions and associations from the world. Mixing those nonverbal physical metaphors with the language models will improve the language models. I don't even think it will turn out to be hard. Having eyes that you can move and focus, and ears that you can direct will probably get you a long way. With 2 caveats: 1) our DNA does give us hints on what to be attracted to; there's no reason for a model to look or listen in a particular direction, we have instincts and hungers, and 2) smell and touch are really really rich, especially smell, and they're really hard to implement. Incidentally: the article says that we've been optimized by evolution for cognition, but what could have been optimized was child-rearing. Having an instinct to train might be more innate and extensive than any instinct to comprehend. Human babies are born larval, and can't survive on their own for years if not decades. Training is not an optional step. Maybe the algorithms are fine, and our training methods are still hare-brained? We're training them on language, and most of what is written is wrong or even silly. Being able to catch a ball is never wrong, and will never generate bad data.