Communication: Babies vs. Language Models

Guests: 

• Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington
• Michael Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell

Producer: Katherine Moncure

Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

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More info:

• Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine Learning
• Lecture: Artificial Intelligence
• SFI programs: Education

Books: 

• Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Talks: 

• Why "Self-Generated Learning” May Be More Radical and Consequential Than First Appears by Linda Smith
• Children’s Early Language Learning: An Inspiration for Social AI, by Michael Frank at Stanford HAI
• The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell

Papers & Articles:

• “Curriculum Learning With Infant Egocentric Videos,” in NeurIPS 2023 (September 21)
• “The Infant’s Visual World The Everyday Statistics for Visual Learning,” by Swapnaa Jayaraman and Linda B. Smith, in The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development: Brain, Behavior, and Cultural Context, Chapter 20, Cambridge University Press (September 26, 2020)
• “Can lessons from infants solve the problems of data-greedy AI?” in Nature (March 18, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00713-5
• “Episodes of experience and generative intelligence,” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (October 19, 2022), doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.012
• “Baby steps in evaluating the capacities of large language models,” in Nature Reviews Psychology (June 27, 2023), doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00211-x
• “Auxiliary task demands mask the capabilities of smaller language models,” in COLM (July 10, 2024)
• “Learning the Meanings of Function Words From Grounded Language Using a Visual Question Answering Model,” in Cognitive Science (First published: 14 May 2024), doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13448