Consider the talon. It is an object of menace, of capacity for violence, purely by virtue of its shape. It is exquisitely crafted by evolution to pierce through the skin of prey animals with its innate sharpness and to hold their bodies with its curvature. Remarkably, the talon is not exceptional; it’s not a uniquely exquisite thing in the grand scheme of the world’s biological heritage. Rather, everything in the chain of material reality from the protein up to the ecosystem is the result of form optimization according to the laws of Nature. The cheetah runs with explosive speed because of its musculo-skeletal perfection, the shark’s deadliness is due to the micro-vortices formed by its skin while pursuing prey in the great oceans, and even the cell’s semi-permeable membrane shapes itself as a sphere, so it can maximize productive volume while minimizing surface area. Every organism is a naturally shape-optimized survival machine.
The dominant perspective on the nature of intelligence holds it to be bound up in language. This isn’t all that surprising, given the step-change in synthetic linguistic production delivered through large language models. The Valley that created these AI models sees a deep truth to crafting intelligences that speak in the same way humans do. Although there really is something special about language and its role in the emergence of the modern human, I believe the present fixation is a red herring.
In contrast to the absolute primacy of form, language is a latter-day aberration, a monkey business that we can’t stop obsessing over because our every thought is expressed in it. But in the theater of non-human Darwinian competition, no organism argues its way out of a fight with another that has superior morphology. Confronted by a hungry tiger in the forest, you will be torn limb from limb no matter how good your rhetoric.
To get at the foundation of shape’s relation to life: anything that physically exists has a form. A form begets a certain set of functions, and evolution chooses the winners, the best expressions of function. So when Nature decrees that an organism shall go forth and multiply, the reason it survives is contained in its form. Form is the carrier of Nature’s intelligence. DNA is the plainest case: it does nothing but encode how form should arise across multiple scales within an organism. It is also the intelligence at the root of all known life.
The obvious question is why — if form is so much more primordial than language, why has language won the first round of synthetic intelligence? Theories proliferate about the origins of language and its effect on the population fitness of homo sapiens against our peers from around 50,000 years ago, but whatever the original causes and tangled web of relationships are there, the eventual reason is that language was the first thing to be transcoded into machine-readable form. Since its inception in the 1990s, Unicode has proven capable of storing every imaginable linguistic output of our crazy, babbling species, from Chinese characters to emojis. Everything ever written on the internet is, of course, part of the training data for the LLMs, but armed with digital cameras and text detection programs, the complete pre-internet textual corpus of our entire species is fair game, too.
Over millennia, we unwittingly flattened human culture into a transmissible and persistent record of binary data, so by the time the transformer architecture arrived, human intuition had already been perfectly laid out as a corpse of words for the machine beast to feast upon. In sum, the human-comprehensible structure of the world was first exposed as verbal utterances which corresponded to things we observed, then those verbal utterances were written into letters, then those letters were rapidly digitized. But language can never fully represent reality, so LLMs are fed on a second-order nature: the world as metabolized by the human.
