Why Children (and Maybe You) Learn Faster than AI

A new paper outlines the incredible learning abilities of children over AI and what the reasons are

But surely AI can outperform us human beings in just about everything — the vast processing power and data must mean that?!

Well, yes, but when it comes to efficiency of the amount of data in, and the ability to learn the language, children vastly outperform AI. And I mean vastly — Caroline Rowland et al. of the Max Planck Institute in Germany calculate that if children learned at the same rate as ChatGPT it would take them 92’000 years to learn a language and we’re not even talking about bilingual children (of which there are many)!

Oh, wow, but how?

Well, this “how” has been the focus of endless study on language acquisition. Caroline Rowland et al. have synthesised decades of research into what they name a constructivist theory of language acquisition — this basically focuses on how children construct and form symbolic language rather than a top down or in-born process (which is included in this).

Linguistic representations are created by learning mechanisms constrained to build structure via a process that assimilates new information from the input into existing knowledge, and modifies…