x

LESSWRONG

LW

Fermi EstimationMachine Learning (ML)NeuroscienceWorld Modeling

14

Do humans really learn from "little" data?

by Alice Wanderland

14th Jan 2025

1 min read

14

This is a linkpost for https://aliceandbobinwanderland.substack.com/p/do-humans-really-learn-with-little

How much data does it take to pretrain a (human) brain? I conducted a (fairer) Fermi estimate.

The post goes through the following questions:

How long does it take to grow a human brain?
- How many waking seconds do we have in our life?
- How many “tokens” or “data points” does a human brain process in a second?
  - Can we simply count the spikes?
How many bits (spikes and non-spikes) does it take for the brain to process 1 sensory “piece of information”?
How do those numbers stack up against LLMs?

To get to this conclusion table:

Fermi EstimationMachine Learning (ML)NeuroscienceWorld Modeling

14

New Comment

Rendering 0/5 comments, sorted by

(show all) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:26 AM

More from Alice Wanderland

Curated and popular this week

5

Do humans really learn from "little" data? — LessWrong

Comment Permalink

The linked video says so at 30:45