Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. When Cástulo de la Rocha arrived at the East LA Barrio Free Clinic in 1977, he had just moved back from Berkeley, where he'd gone to law school. "I pulled up in my old beat-up Volkswagen. I had long hair for sure, holes in my pants and things like that. So a very typical hippie," he recalls.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more In My Bag Look Up Say More Trending Now Mashable Selects Creator Playbook Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net All Series Language learning that doesn't expire. The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. New U.S. users can get lifetime access to all 14 Babbel languages for $159 (reg.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. New U.S. users can get lifetime access to all 14 Babbel languages for $159 (MSRP $299) with code LEARN from StackSocial, including 10,000+ hours of lessons developed by more than 100 expert linguists. There are plenty of apps willing to teach you how to say in another language. Babbel takes things a little more seriously: new U.S. users can get lifetime access to all 14 languages for $159 (MSRP $299) with the StackSocial code LEARN for a limited time. One of Babbel's biggest differentiators is the people behind the lessons.

Look Up Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Get lifetime access to Babbel's complete 14-language lineup with this limited-time offer Your next language is waiting. The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Through Sept. 10, new U.S. users can get a Babbel Lifetime Language Learning Subscription covering all 14 languages for $159 (reg.

Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Babbel helps you learn a new language naturally, and lifetime access is just $159 with code LEARN. Every language-learning app is a little different, but many of them have the same issue.

LLMs need vastly more data than children to learn language. Understanding why could help us create more efficient models--and reveal more about developing minds. People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. 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. Four short years after the release of ChatGPT, many of us now take it for granted that we can converse naturally with our phones or computers. LLMs like Claude, DeepSeek, and OpenAI's GPT models are fluent and flexible enough to masquerade convincingly as humans. But peek behind the computational curtain, and there's a catch: Teaching a computer to use human language still 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--and way more than children might hear by their first birthday, when they typically start to grab hold of language. "The progress recently has been amazing," Michael C. Frank, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, says of LLMs. "But we still have to burn down a forest and scrape the entire sum of all human knowledge to re-create this milestone that happens in our living rooms over the course of a year."

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. As executive director of the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, Jamie Justice oversees a professional science fair for cutting-edge longevity science around the world. With her team of more than a dozen judges, Justice, a gerontology researcher, has spent the past several years soliciting and then reviewing applications from the world's best scientific minds, looking for the most exciting ideas on how to live longer, better.

UC Berkeley professor admits to using AI to edit op-ed on students' math skills Zvezdelina Stankova says she used AI to'help edit' an article about some of her students being'five to eight years' behind A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were "five to eight years" behind and lacked a "middle school" education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system's test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren't sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley's mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared. Over the weekend, journalists at Berkeley's student newspaper, the Daily Californian, noticed the op-ed's language sounded like AI . According to Berkeley sophomore Francis Luo, they ran it through AI-detection software Pangram, which claimed 33% of the op-ed had been generated or assisted by AI.

Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. New U.S. users can get lifetime access to lessons in 14 different languages with Babbel for $159 with code LEARN, via StackSocial. Learning a new language isn't easy, but it also might not be as hard as some apps make it seem.

Does an AI-filled future seem like promise or peril to today's teens and tweens? We went right to the source. When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we'd hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were using it. We were also listening for concerns that were less kid-specific, like deepfakes or job destruction. But what we actually heard when we asked kids aged 10 to 18 about AI had tons of nuance. Many of the same kids who can go on and on about music, rock climbing, or soccer met our questions with words like "bruh" and "meh"--or were so deeply against AI or uninterested in making it part of their lives that they didn't want to talk about it at all. One teen said his peers use it for things they know they shouldn't, like writing papers. One told us she won't touch AI because of the environmental impact. A few said they find the whole field disheartening: "AI isn't the solution to our problems," said Winter, a 17-year-old.