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.

Smartphones have long offered voice-to-text transcription, but the same can't be said for sign-language-to-text. That's changing today with the launch of the Pixel 11 family, which marks the debut of DeepMind's new sign-language-to-text (SL2T) model. Google has embedded the model inside of Gboard and Live Transcribe, where it will allow deaf and hard of hearing users to sign to their phone anywhere where they would have normally typed in the past. In practice, that will give those users a faster, more natural way to search the web, write messages and converse with Google's Gemini chatbot. "There is great diversity among deaf people in terms of their level of proficiency in signing, speaking, reading, and writing, so it is important to support access in all modalities," says DeepMind.

'Patients will need doctors who can stand apart from the machine long enough to know when it is wrong, incomplete, or right for the wrong reason.' 'Patients will need doctors who can stand apart from the machine long enough to know when it is wrong, incomplete, or right for the wrong reason.' What happens when medical students rely on AI - and never develop their own judgment? AI's danger isn't just in experts losing the ability to reason. It's that trainees may never learn how to do so in the first place I n healthcare, there's growing concern over doctors becoming less clinically adept as they increasingly rely on AI tools.

Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic 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. Trusted by millions of learners, you can pay $159 once (reg. Learning a new language isn't easy, but it also might not be as hard as some apps make it seem. They take a more practical approach to teaching, and there's even an AI conversation partner who can help you practice your pronunciation.

The University of Chicago is banning laptops, tablets and phones for first-year law students in a sweeping AI ban aimed at preserving critical thinking in legal education.