The Download: kids outlearning AI, and space travel agents

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why 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? Kids show that it could be possible to learn more with less. Far less. By reverse-engineering the way they learn, scientists hope to create more data-efficient AI models—and perhaps settle enduring questions about language and children’s developing minds. Here’s how researchers are trying to close the data gap . —Elise Cutts Job titles of the future: space travel agent As co-owner of a luxury lifestyle firm, Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild vacation dreams into reality. In 2018, he got a phone call that would open up a new frontier: Axiom Space wanted to find citizen explorers willing to pay $50 million each to join the first fully private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), slated for April 2022. This showed Chiporukha that the sky was no longer the limit; it was the market. He successfully signed up a private astronaut and then launched SpaceVIP in 2021 to offer celestial experiences that mix culture, science, and purpose. Find out what it takes to become the Expedia of the cosmos . —Linda Childers These stories are from the next issue of our magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to get your copy as soon as it lands. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Both parties a