Imo, this analogy breaks down if you take a holistic evolutionary lens. The amount of time you spent learning chess is minuscule compared to the amount of time evolution spent optimizing for creating the general learning machine that is your brain. It’s not obvious how to cleanly analogize the current frontier model training recipe to evolution. But, I claim that your brain has certain inductive biases at birth that make it possible to eventually learn to do thing X, and directly training on thing X wouldn’t have worked for evolution because the general model was just too bad.
Imo, this analogy breaks down if you take a holistic evolutionary lens. The amount of time you spent learning chess is minuscule compared to the amount of time evolution spent optimizing for creating the general learning machine that is your brain. It’s not obvious how to cleanly analogize the current frontier model training recipe to evolution. But, I claim that your brain has certain inductive biases at birth that make it possible to eventually learn to do thing X, and directly training on thing X wouldn’t have worked for evolution because the general model was just too bad.