Today's AI still lacks innate knowledge

The minute deers are born, they know how to stand up.

The minute cuckoos are born, they push the host eggs around them with their strong flat back.

Evolution endows species with innate abilities.

Humans have innate cognitive abilities. Counting is one of them. While counting seems very easy, it is an ability unique to humans.

Imagine you live in ancient time, you own many sheep. One day you have a feeling that maybe you are missing 1 sheep or 2, but you don't know for sure. What can you do to ensure that you have the same number of sheep in the morning as you do in the evening? This may seem trivial but remember you are from 10,000 years ago when numbers haven't been invented yet.

Well, you could point at each sheep and say "mehhh, mehhh, mehhh... " but after a while, you lose track of how many times you've chanted. But hear is the thing, you are already starting to count! Now all you need to do is replacing each utterance with a stick or a little stone and you've solved the problem using a unary numeral system.

This is almost like magic because with absolutely no training/learning and no (evolutionary) reasons, humans are able to make the connection that a sheep can be *substituted* with a vocal uttrance or just about anything in order to solve the problem, in a way that no animals can.

Now, with the amount of training today's gigantic models receive, consuming energy that can power an entire city, running roughly 10^24 flops, they still can't count the number of r's in a word like "strawberry" without being explicitly programmed to count. What went wrong? Well, unlike creatures with DNA, AI programs are "born" blank slates (slates of random noises to be precise since their initial weights are randomly generated) and then engineers just throw human data at them so they could change weights and throw humanly acceptable responses back. Imagine an octupus is born with octupus innate knowledge and is immediately trained to solve *human* problems. How well can it do? It's almost like a miracle that today's blank slate AI can do so well on human tasks. But they can't go beyond what they are specifically trained for; they have no human creativity and no intention because they don't have the innate cognitive priors humans have.

Building so-called world models won't help either. An octupus with its inborn knowledge, however trained afterbirth, would still have an octupus world model because its DNA doesn't come from interaction with today's environment but from a very long evolutionary process in the past.