The Download: kids outlearning AI, and space travel agents
This newsletter explores the 'data efficiency gap' between children and AI models, suggesting that studying human learning could improve machine intelligence. It also highlights the emergence of luxury space travel agencies for private citizens.
Why it matters
Understanding how children learn with less data could lead to breakthroughs in AI development, while the commercialization of space travel marks a new frontier in luxury markets.
Plus: A new Amazon data center could become the US’s most polluting power plant.
Plus: both parties are turning against AI data centers ahead of the midterms.
This is today's edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.
Teaching a computer to use human language requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times more words than a person will experience in the process of mastering their mother tongue.
This yawning divide between children and machines is called the data efficiency gap. It raises a tantalizing question for cognitive scientists and a challenge for the architects of AI models: how can children still outperform the most linguistically sophisticated machines ever built?
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