A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

So "the reason it originally exists" and "what breaks if you take it away" aren't necessarily the same thing.

As with, say, digestion, or an major organ like the liver, it's reasonable to think that it does simple things in simple animals, and more complex things in more complex ones.

Take out an animal's liver, it's not one process that stops working, it's dozens. There's one or two that will kill it quicker, so those are the ones it dies of, but artificial livers are hard to build as they implement so many vital processes.

No that was not the question. Why precisely sleep is essential is a complete non-sequitur to the original question, which was "does something occur during sleep which resembles what is described in TFA such that it can justifiably be called sleep."

As a general rule of thumb, if you find someone's responses incoherent, it's good practice to check what is actually being discussed.

Older than bilateral symmetry even - jellyfish are thought to sleep, sponges however do not. Jellyfish don't have spinal columns, lungs, gills, livers, kidneys, hearts, guts or blood, but they do have nerves and they do seem to sleep.

There is widespread consensus as to which processes failing will kill you first in acute liver failure, but it governs dozens of processes that, medium term, are essential to life; not all are widely understood.

In the case of sleep, it seems to be nervous system dysregulation that kills. It's notable that comatose patients don't seem to suffer the ill-effects of sleep deprivation. But still, "the thing that kills an animal subject to extreme sleep deprivation" is not necessarily "the original process for which sleep was evolved".

Human brains do some fairly complicated vital things during sleep (REM, spindles, slow wave activity), but that can't be the original essential function - the simplest animals that sleep (jellyfish) don't really have brains, although they do have nervous systems.

Whereas those animals which lack nervous systems (sponges) can't be said to sleep, although it's reasonable to ask.. "how would you tell?", or ask whether the question itself makes sense for something that lacks the ability to sense, plan, act.

So another framing is "anything which can be awake, must also be asleep". But one might equally argue, we don't know why animals are awake.

We can go one step further and suppose that, in order for an animal to act, to exercise will, it must do so at above its average metabolic rate, and in doing so it necessarily incurs metabolic debt.