From baby talk to baby artificial intelligence

Dr. Brenden Lake, a psychologist at New York University, and his wife, Dr. Tammy Kwan, with their 1-year-old daughter, Luna, who wears a soft pink hat on her head with a lightweight GoPro-type camera attached to the front, which records things from her point of view as she plays, at their home in New York, April 24, 2024. Understanding how infants acquire language could help us build better computing tools for understanding both AI and ourselves. — The New York Times

We ask a lot of ourselves as babies. Somehow, we must grow from sensory blobs into mobile, rational, attentive communicators in just a few years.

Here you are, a baby without a vocabulary, in a room cluttered with toys and stuffed animals. You pick up a Lincoln Log, and your caretaker tells you, “This is a ‘log’.” Eventually, you come to understand that “log” does not refer strictly to this particular brown plastic cylinder or to brown plastic cylinders in general, but to brown plastic cylinders that embody the characteristics of felled, denuded tree parts, which are also, of course, “logs”.