AI Shows Basic Language Skills by Learning Some Words from Baby Experiences
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Scientists fed sights and sounds from a baby's experiences to an AI to see if it could learn to match words like "crib" and "puzzle" to images. The AI had some success, though its abilities fall short of a small child's.
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The AI was trained on just 1% (61 hours) of one baby's waking life from ages 6 months to 2 years. This suggests basic language learning can occur through simple association of words and images.
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The study explores theories about innate language abilities versus the need for specialized cognitive skills to learn language. The AI's progress seems to support the idea that some language learning can happen through basic associative learning.
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While the AI learned to identify some concrete nouns well, it struggled with certain common words like "hand" and lacks understanding of verbs, prepositions, abstract concepts, etc.
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Some experts say the AI's abilities may reflect how dogs/parrots learn words, but more cognitive skills are likely needed for full human language acquisition.