I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't".
Meaning: it might just provide a big advantage.
I don't want to overextend and assume that any advantage extends to LLMs. That rest-and-recuperate advantage might also extend to LLM-based AIs. Or maybe not, and the rest-and-recuperate is mainly useful for biology-based organisms. But there is some logic to it.
> The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure.
In my understanding, it's well-understood that sleep is used to consolidate and store long-term memories (amongst other functions, like cell and muscle repair). They've found this memory-consolidation-during-sleep even in relatively simple animals like bees.
Sleep-like states exist in animals with nervous systems with a complexity above that found in flatworms, even snails sleep. Sleep therefore appears to be an essential characteristic of more complex biological nervous systems, i.e. biological computers, should you care to stretch the analogy. The more complex the nervous system, the greater the requirement for sleep.
What is described in the OP is therefore not a specific characteristic of sleep. It may however be a "useful" rhetorical device.
I do however object to the extensive use of such rhetorical tricks in the conversations that surround LLMs. For example, why does a consumer-grade LLM display "thinking" while it is actually sending data from my computer to some datacentre, processing it, and sending the result back? Equally, why does it output human-emotive phrases such as "sorry" when such computation is revealed to be incorrect?
Such rhetorical tricks, and more, likely underlie to a large degree the popularity of LLMs, despite their actual performance being clearly below what the rhetoric implies.
> I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't".
You're talking about different things: biological necessity and evolutionary benefit.
You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise provide all other needed things), and seeing if it will eventually die.
> You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise provide all other needed things), and seeing if it will eventually die.
That is actually almost impossible to do. The rat study was as close as we’ve ever come, and it’s still debated whether the rats died due to lack of sleep or some other mechanism, since the autopsy couldn’t confirm a cause of death. (It could have been due to the way the experiment ran, for example, not the lack of sleep.)
If I remember correctly, fatal insomnia shares most symptoms with other prion diseases (in which there might be no lack of sleep involved), so it's probably the brain damage that causes death, not insomnia itself.
Much of Europe is close to the ocean, high in latitude, or mountainous, and climates there are more temperate. You don’t need AC there; AC is a luxury.
Southeast or central US has considerably higher wet bulb temperatures than Europe does in summer. Without HVAC, there’s a good chunk of the year where it’s too hot to get much done.
Aye, but it’s also possible for people to find their own purpose and meaning. Some find it in religion, some in art, some in love or nature.
It will be a transition, for sure - there would no longer be meaning in “winning the game” in a capitalistic or scientific sense. Anything you want to produce or learn, the AI could already produce or has already learned. Now you have to do it just for the love of the process.
I have a musician friend who likes to say that good artists overwhelmingly make art for their own benefit. Not to advance the world or blow people’s minds, but because something inside of them needs to come out, and art is how they express it. And that part of us isn’t going to go away.
> As listed here, they are sorted in descending desirability for inclusion in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Surely you mean ascending!
Preserves > marmalade & jam > jelly
I want maximal fruit flavor for combination with my peanut butter.
Which makes me consider other options. Peanut butter and banana is a classic, ofc, but should I try even-more-concentrated fruits? Fruit jerky? Dried mangos? But then the texture would be weird; probably have to chop up the dried fruit, first. Or what about making a fruit-based tea, then using that as the water for making the bread?
Or, hell, we could subvert the entire PB&J structure. Use strawberry fruit jerky as the "bread", and PB + ... banana? as the filling. (Considered various "bread" fillings, like crushed Ritz crackers. I dunno, I'd try it. Strawberry jerky, with a little peanut butter and crushed ritz crackers in between)
I use dried fruit, much less messy, you don't end up sticky. Raisins work very well, chopped dates are quite nice as well but a pain to apply so I generally buy whole dried dates and halve them. Sliced or chopped figs are quite good, apple rings are fantastic. Mango work fairly well as is but sometime are a bit tough, chopping is often a good idea. Chopped apricot is a favorite, cranberries were a disappointment, pineapple works well as does fresh chopped pineapple as long as you let it drain a bit before putting it on your sandwich. Sundried tomatoes and fresh sliced green pepper is better than one would expect.
Some good thin potato chips are a great way to add some crunch, I prefer Old Dutch Original, great on many sorts of sandwich.
Ahhhh, I love this food experimentation and the food data. Of my friends, I'm the one coming up with weird combos and being like "try this!", and it gives me a splash of the warm fuzzies to find other experimenters.
I swear, if ever we get proper robot maids, I'm going to give mine a sandwich roulette wheel system, with different wheels for different ingredients. "What sandwich am I eating today? Surprise me! --> {Tuna, cantaloupe, malt vinegar, fried asian noodles}"
This is very much a personal preference thing, I suppose. When I make a PB&J, I want no pieces of fruit whatsoever. Jam is acceptable but not preferred, while preserves are too chunky and I would just not make a PB&J at that point. Marmalade I do not use for anything because I find the bitter flavor to be extremely unpleasant.
When making a PB&J, I want just enough to jelly to add a little flavor to the peanut butter. Which is why my dad always called them "choke sandwiches" when I made them.
> Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu
Right-click menus can get cumbersome. I've seen a lot of software that suffers from function bloat - not that the functions don't work, or don't play well together, but that the user interface becomes too overwhelming for users as the number of available actions explodes. This is particularly tough for new users.
This is where voice controls could shine: as we interact with computers in more and more complex ways, we need a way to specify our desires simply and easily. And if we can't do so easily, the software has to remain simple to be usable.
> I don't really want to talk to the computer despite what 1950's sci-fi books led us to believe.
I'll talk to a computer, even in an office setting, if it adds enough value. But it's got to be a lot of value. Handsfree while driving is great, Iron Man talking to Jarvis while he's flying around makes sense. Many of us here are developers, engineers, or scientists, and our work has already been co-optimized with mouse and keyboard and whatever software we're in.
But when the software is less well-developed, or when it's not just dealing with technical data dumps, I imagine that a voice interface might be more useful.
So I think this idea has legs. But a successful implementation might also well be decades out.
I like the sleep ear plugs; they're silicone plugs that are moldable. So they don't tend to extend out so much, or over-fill the ear like buds do.
I was at a festival a year back and unfortunately our camp was near a minor side stage which was running a daytime talent show. I wanted to take an afternoon nap. The sleep ear plugs + noise canceling headphones dulled the moderate noise down to almost nothing.
Meaning: it might just provide a big advantage.
I don't want to overextend and assume that any advantage extends to LLMs. That rest-and-recuperate advantage might also extend to LLM-based AIs. Or maybe not, and the rest-and-recuperate is mainly useful for biology-based organisms. But there is some logic to it.
> The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure.
In my understanding, it's well-understood that sleep is used to consolidate and store long-term memories (amongst other functions, like cell and muscle repair). They've found this memory-consolidation-during-sleep even in relatively simple animals like bees.
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