Commentary
An MIT report finds that a child can still beat artificial intelligence (AI) in learning a language.
There is hope for humanity after all.
The analysis commented that humans have used language for at least 100,000 years and then observed, “And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child.”
While AI can now spit out complex math solutions in seconds, create videos of startling “reality,” and pose hacking threats to our electrical grids, it still has a devil of time learning a language.
MIT says the challenge for AI is that “teaching a computer to use human language still requires an inhuman amount of data.”
Experts say the divide between children and AI has been labeled “the data efficiency gap.” The same experts are now trying to figure out how kids can master language while AI is still essentially mute.
MIT suggests that kids are apparently learning more with less. They note that a preteen raised in a traditional home will probably hear about 100 million words. By the time that kid is 20, the word count is probably 300 million words. AI, on the other hand, may be exposed to a far larger number of words and yet it still can’t get it right.
So they are asking, “Are we born with a language instinct … a quirk of our biology?”
But do not rest on your language laurels. It is very likely that some Silicon Valley AI employee is trying to break the code. Yet the MIT report quotes one expert: “It’s just totally miraculous. … If you train GPT-2 on 30 million words, you get a nonsense generator; you don’t get a kid.”
Perhaps it is the inherent miracle of the human mind that begins to evolve even in the womb. With all of our scientific know-how, we still cannot say how babies begin to learn language. That reality, and what it represents, may be the ultimate reason why AI will be kept in check.
Originally published by Gatestone Institute
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
