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 dat — Source: MIT Tech Review 🔗 https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/24/1142863/the-download-kids-outlearning-ai-space-travel-agents/