That may change, particularly if the intelligence of LLMs proves to be analogous to our own in some deep way—a point that is still very much undecided. However, if the similarities are there, so is the potential for knowledge. We have a complete mechanical understanding of LLMs and can pry apart their structure, which we cannot yet do with the brain. And some of the smartest people in the world are engaged in making LLMs smaller and more efficient; it seems possible that the push for miniaturization will rediscover some tricks also discovered by the blind watchmaker. But these things are not a given.
I would push back on this a little bit. While it has not helped us to understand our own intelligence, it has made me question whether such a thing even exists. Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and make decisions. When CNNs learned to recognize faces through a series of hierarchical abstractions that make intuitive sense it's hard to deny the similarities to what we're doing as humans. Perhaps it's all just emergent properties of some messy evolved substrate.
The big lesson from the AI development in the last 10 years from me has been "I guess humans really aren't so special after all" which is similar to what we've been through with Physics. Theories often made the mistake of giving human observers some kind of special importance, which was later discovered to be the cause of theories not generalizing.
> Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and make decisions...Perhaps it's all just emergent properties of some messy evolved substrate.
Yeah, it is very likely that there are not laws that will do this, it's the substrate. The fruit fly brain (let alone human) has been mapped, and we've figured out that it's not just the synapse count, but the 'weights' that matter too [0]. Mind you, those weights adjust in real time when a living animal is out there.
You'll see in literature that there are people with some 'lucky' form of hydranencephaly where their brain is as thin as paper. But they vote, get married, have kids, and for some strange reason seem to work in mailrooms (not a joke). So we know it's something about the connectome that's the 'magic' of a human.
My pet theory: We need memristors [2] to better represent things. But that takes redesigning the computer from the metal on up, so is unlikely to occur any time soon with this current AI craze.
> The big lesson from the AI development in the last 10 years from me has been "I guess humans really aren't so special after all" which is similar to what we've been through with Physics.
Yeah, biologists get there too, just the other way abouts, with animals and humans. Like, dogs make vitamin C internally, and humans have that gene too, it's just dormant, ready for evolution (or genetic engineering) to reactivate. That said, these neuroscience issues with us and the other great apes are somewhat large and strange. I'm not big into that literature, but from what little I know, the exact mechanisms and processes that get you from tool using ourangs to tool using humans, well, those seem to be a bit strange and harder to grasp for us. Again, not in that field though.
In the end though, humans are special. We're the only ones on the planet that ever really asked a question. There's a lot to us and we're actually pretty strange in the end. There's many centuries of work to do with biology, we're just at the wading stage of that ocean.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_connectome
These cases seem totally fascinating. Have you any links to examples or more information (i'm also curious about the curious detail of them tending to work in mail rooms)?