Yeah, that's bothered me as well. Andrej Karpathy does this all the time when he talks about the human brain and making analogies to LLMs. He makes speculative statements about how the human brain works as though it's established fact.

Andrej does use biological examples, but he's a lot more cautious about biomimicry, and often uses biological examples to show why AI and bio are different. Like he doesn't believe that animals use classical RL because a baby horse can walk after 5 minutes which definitely wasn't achieved through classical RL. He doesn't pretend to know how a horse developed that ability, just that it's not classical RL.

A lot of Ilya's takes in this interview felt like more of a stretch. The emotions and LLM argument felt like of like "let's add feathers to planes because birds fly and have feathers". I bet continual learning is going to have some kind of internal goal beyond RL eval functions, but these speculations about emotions just feel like college dorm discussions.

The thing that made Ilya such an innovator (the elegant focus on next token prediction) was so simple, and I feel like his next big take is going to be something about neuron architecture (something he eluded to in the interview but flat out refused to talk about).