When a baby learns to talk, nobody hands them a dictionary. They listen to the people around them, recognize patterns, and start reproducing sounds. “Ma-ma.” “Da-da.” “No!” (That one, they learn fast.)<\/p>\n
AI learns the same way. Except instead of listening to its family for 3 years, it analyzes billions of texts in a few weeks. And instead of saying “ma-ma,” it says “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”<\/p>\n
When we “train” an AI, we show it tons of data. For a language model like ChatGPT, that data is text: books, websites, articles, forums. Billions and billions of words.<\/p>\n
The model looks at these texts and learns to predict: which word comes after which word?<\/strong> If you see “The cat sat on the ___,” the word “mat” is more likely than “volcano.” The model learns these probabilities by seeing millions of examples.<\/p>\n It’s not more complicated than that. AI is a glorified word predictor. But when you do this at the scale of hundreds of billions of words, something surprising emerges: the model starts to “understand” grammar, facts, logic, style \u2014 without being explicitly taught any of these concepts.<\/p>\n Like a child, AI learns through trial and error. At the start of training, its predictions are completely random. Gibberish. Then, with each mistake, its parameters get adjusted a tiny bit. After billions of adjustments, the predictions become good.<\/p>\n It’s like learning to shoot a basketball. The first shots go everywhere. But with each throw, your brain adjusts the angle, the force, the wrist a little. After thousands of shots, you’re sinking baskets with your eyes closed.<\/p>\n The difference? AI makes billions of “shots” per day. That’s why it takes weeks instead of years.<\/p>\n A child learns language with a few thousand hours of conversation. ChatGPT needed the equivalent of millions of years of reading<\/strong>. AI is fast in compute time, but incredibly inefficient compared to the human brain.<\/p>\n And most importantly, a child learns in context<\/strong>. They know “hot” burns because they touched the stove. AI knows that “hot” and “burn” often appear in the same sentences, but it’s never been hurt.<\/p>\n That difference is why AI can write a poem about pain without ever having suffered. It knows the words<\/strong> of pain. Not the experience.<\/p>\n Understanding how AI learns changes how you use it. You know its answers are based on statistical patterns, not deep understanding. You know it’s good for well-documented topics and bad for obscure ones. You know its “mistakes” aren’t stupidity \u2014 they’re the limits of a system that predicts words.<\/p>\n At Laeka Research<\/a>, we study these learning mechanisms to understand how to make them better and more aligned with how humans actually think. And with Sherpa<\/a>, we explain all of this simply, for free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a baby learns to talk, nobody hands them a dictionary. They listen to the people around them, recognize patterns,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[192],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-and-you"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":695,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions\/695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Mistakes make the learning<\/h2>\n
The big difference with humans<\/h2>\n
Why this matters<\/h2>\n