> I will ignore the insane comparison between neurons and LLMs. But
Please don't.
I mean, you yourself specifically said to "Look at octopi with their insane nervous system", and that's exactly what I'm doing and my conclusion is "doesn't look that bad compared to what else we do now".
Also note that I expressly noted that synapses, not neurons, are the important factor in parameter count.
> The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/a-z-index.htm
> Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.
The existence of specialists in professional settings proves this claim false.
As does the existence of special-purpose robots, all the way down to injection moulds designed for one specific part, which overall make the end product cheaper, a process which probably started with whoever invented whichever came first of the wind or water powered grain mill.
Much of the economic gain of the industrial revolution was replacing the very expensive salaries of general-purpose humans with machines that, despite being extremely single-purpose and having high purchase and maintenance costs, were still cheaper than the wages of the huge number of humans needed for equal output.
Since the industrial revolution we have been the species that makes tools even though it sometimes also uses slavery, not the species that relies on slaves and has tools for decorative reasons.