> but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code

Uh what? You can sit there step by step and execute assembly code, writing things down on a piece of paper and get the correct final result. The limits are things like attention span, which is separate from intelligence.

Human brains operate continuously, with multiple parts being active at once, with weight adjustment done in real time both in the style of backpropagation, and real time updates for things like "memory". How do you train an LLM to behave like that?

Couldn't you periodically re-train it on what it's already done and use the context window for more short term memory? That's kind of what humans do - we can't learn a huge amount in short time but can accumulate a lot slowly (school, experience).

A major obstacle is that they don't learn from their users, probably because of privacy. But imagine if your context window was shared with other people, and/or all your conversations were used to train it. It would get to know individuals and perhaps treat them differently, or maybe even manipulate how they interact with each other so it becomes like a giant Jeffrey Epstein.