I often hear from older generations (Gen Y, Gen X, and beyond) that my generation (Gen Z) is "more aware." They say we just know more about life, earlier. I did a bit of reading on it, but honestly, I'd rather freestyle the logic, because the answer is staring us right in the face.
It isn't that we are fundamentally different biological beings; it's that our training data is massive.
The primary driver is the internet. For us, the internet wasn't a tool we learned to use; it was the environment we were born into. By the age of four or five, we were already looking through "little screens" at the lives of people on the other side of the planet.
Think about the previous generations at age five. Their world was their neighborhood, maybe three TV channels, and whatever books were in the local library. Their "worldview" was a local patch of land. Our worldview, from the moment we could tap a screen, was global. We were exposed to more knowledge, more cultures, and more conflicting perspectives before we even hit middle school than most people in the 1970s saw in a lifetime.
I find myself thinking in terms of machine learning models to describe this. If you look at the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-4, what is the fundamental difference? It's scaling. It's more parameters and, more importantly, vastly more input.
When you feed a model more diverse data, it doesn't just "know more facts"—it develops a more sophisticated understanding of the world. It starts to see patterns, nuances, and "latent spaces" that a smaller model simply can't perceive.
We are the human version of that scaling law. Because we grew up with a high-bandwidth connection to the sum of human information, our "internal models" are trained on a much larger dataset. We didn't just get more info; we developed an understanding shaped around that information.
By the time we enter the professional world or the "adult" world, we aren't starting from scratch. We've already seen ten thousand different ways to live, ten thousand different career paths, and ten thousand different failures. This gives us a "meta-perspective" that looks like wisdom or "awareness" to older generations, but to us, it's just the default.
We aren't smarter by birth; we are just the first generation to be trained on the full library of human experience from day one. And if we're already "GPT-4" compared to the previous generation's "GPT-2," the real question is: what does the next iteration look like?
Why are we more aware than the previous generation?
(I was going to write "gen," but I didn't want to be a cliche for the admonition that "young people use short versions of everything." Fuck you people.)
Why are we more aware than the previous gen?
I constantly hear that we are more aware and that we know more, "we" referring to Gen Z, coming from Gen Y. I hastily did some reading (I've read maybe 58 words) and now I'm freestyling.
I feel that it is because of the internet. What I am recognizing is that, since we grew up with the internet, we were exposed to more. More knowledge, more people. We got to see what people were doing in random parts of the world through little screens. Which Gen Y motherfucker could do that at the age of 4 or 5?
Thus, BY FAR, we had more knowledge, or "info," I'd rather say, from a lot of different topics and people to put things in perspective. I am seeing machine learning models in my head while describing this. For instance: GPT-4 is smarter than GPT-2. What is the reason for that? Yeah, more input and an understanding shaped around that input.
Not going to say more; I feel satisfied with this.