Nobody is telling an experienced heart surgeon to step aside and let a child plan an open heart surgery. And yet, AI and LLMs in particular are being sold as the tools that can do complex tasks like that. But let's leave complex tasks and have a look at marketing behind one of the tools that's aimed at business. The messaging of one of the ads I'm seeing promises that the tools in question can summarise a 150-page long document into a 5-slide presentation. Now, that sounds amazing, if we ignore the fact that a person who wrote a 150-page document has already prepared an outline and is perfectly capable of summarising each section of the document. Writing a 150-page document without a plan and not being able to organise would mean that people have evolved into content generators that need machines to help them write tables of contents and reformat them into a presentation. Coming back to your child analogy, why would a child be better at summarising content it knows nothing about that the person who wrote it?

Wall-clock or subjective time?

I think it would take a human about 2.6 million (waking) years to actually read Common Crawl[0]; though obviously faster if they simply absorb token streams as direct sensory input.

The strength of computers is that transistors are (literally) faster than synapses to the degree to which marathon runners are faster than continental drift; the weakness is they need to, too — current generation AI is only able to be this good due to this advantage allowing it to read far more than any human.

How much this difference matters depends on the use-case: if AI were as good at learning as we are, Tesla's FSD would be level 5 autonomy years ago already, even with just optical input.

[0] April 2024: 386 TiB; assuming 9.83 bits per word and 250 w.p.m: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=386+TiB+%2F+9.83+bits+p...