However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.
Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.
The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.
I disagree, evolution is not perfect nor intelligent (as far as we know). It's never the "best design" that survives, it's always "good enough for now", merely better than other solutions at the time. A billion years of good enough is not necessarily the best it can be theoretically.
I'm sure we can find examples of living processes that are dumb and inefficient, with obvious room for improvement, but have survived for millenia simply because it was good enough.