The Download: kids outlearning AI, and space travel agents

Plus: A new Amazon data center could become the US's most polluting power plant. Plus: both parties are turning against AI data centers ahead of the midterms. Teaching a computer to use human language 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. This yawning divide between children and machines is called the data efficiency gap. It raises a tantalizing question for cognitive scientists and a challenge for the architects of AI models: how can children still outperform the most linguistically sophisticated machines ever built?