Last week, I spent some time with Haley (one year old) doing serious research into ‘putting things into other things’.

We’d brought her a soft toy squirrel and, inevitably, she had found the cardboard box it came in much more interesting. There followed a considerable period of putting various objects into the box and taking them out again. This was pretty interesting, but the discovery that closing the box made the items disappear was even more fascinating. Also, if you moved the box, all the things in it moved at the same time. Brilliant.

Next up was a small basket into which went a toy monkey. Taking the monkey out, Haley replaced it with her smaller monkey toy. However, even after several tries, it became obvious that both monkeys would not fit in the basket at the same time. So, containers had the property of capacity.

Upping the stakes somewhat, we moved onto a toy ark with cutout animal shapes. It had both windows and doors. Holding it on end, it didn’t work the same as the other containers, as when you put an animal it it, it didn’t stay in the ark, but fell out of the window on the other end. Some containers are more complicated than others.

Overall, we spent about an hour investigating the idea of containers, and as always with very small children, Haley’s ability to construct sophisticated models of how the world works impressed me hugely.

I also came away with some important ideas.

In the next year or two, Haley will create exponentially more complex models of the world, and she will do this without language.

If Haley was an LLM, I would have spent many hours telling her hundreds of stories about boxes and monkeys, with the result that she would have been able riff endless variations on container stories. But that doesn’t mean she would understand the underlying physical concepts that govern the interaction between objects. She’d just be a good story teller.

But Haley is human, and will have developed a huge repertoire of knowledge way before she gets to language, which, admittedly, is the icing on the cake.

But all LLM’s have is the icing and no cake. That’s not to say that what they can do is not useful or indeed remarkable, but without the benefit of 300 million years of evolution and the embodied experience that Haley has, I think they will remain excellent storytellers, albeit very useful ones.