LONDON: Artificial intelligence chatbots are sometimes lauded for their rapid-fire generation of comprehensive responses to user prompts.
But when it comes to picking up new languages, the bots are tongue-tied when compared to infants, according to a team of researchers based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the ESRC LuCiD Centre in the UK.
Toddlers' quick growth of social, cognitive and motor skills and deployment of "all their senses" enables them not only to "build their language skills" but to do so at a speed that vastly exceeds what AI can manage.
"If a human learned language at the same rate as ChatGPT, it would take them 92,000 years," the researchers said, publishing their findings in the journal Trends In Cognitive Sciences.
"AI systems process data but children really live it," said Max Planck’s Caroline Rowlands, who believes makers of AI systems should look closely at how young brains function.
The team said they pulled together "wide-ranging evidence from computational science, linguistics, neuroscience and psychology" to propose that children learn much faster than AI through "an active, ever-changing developmental process" that stands apart from how AI bots are "passively" fed texts by people.
Kids "explore their surroundings, continuously creating new opportunities to learn," the researchers said, explaining some of what lies behind the formidable learning powers demonstrated in early life. – dpa
