Toddler development as a metaphor: evolutionary pre-training and efficient post-training
paigeinsf · x · 2026-10-25
Watching a friend's toddler grow up, the author draws two analogies to AI: (1) the brain's "pre-trained model" encodes hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history and survival instincts — children instinctively know what's edible at first sight; (2) humans' sample efficiency and generalization during "post-training" (as babies develop a sense of self) are unparalleled. A brief viewpoint mapping evolutionary priors onto the pre-training/post-training framework.
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