9 articles
A newborn's vision is 30x worse than a camera's. But two years later, the baby is doing something the camera will never do — actually understanding what it's looking at. Here's what visual development reveals about the gap between biological and artificial vision.
Raf Delgado·
Babies extract statistical patterns from the world without anyone teaching them — the same computational logic powering BERT, GPT, and DINO. The comparison is striking. The gap is more interesting.
Raf Delgado·
A two-year-old builds a spatial map of a playground in minutes. A deep RL robot navigating a virtual maze independently grew the same hexagonal grid-cell structure evolution put in the hippocampus. The convergence isn't coincidence — it's math.
Raf Delgado·
Babies keep time before they can walk. AI generates music by counting tokens. The gap between these two things reveals something fundamental about what rhythm actually is — and why closing it matters.
Raf Delgado·
Children are built to extract general principles from ostensive instruction — an evolved system that comes online at 9 months. AI systems can be trained on feedback, but they can't truly be taught. Here's the gap that matters most for every classroom deploying AI right now.
Raf Delgado·
Babies detect mathematical impossibilities before they can say a number. AI systems that ace calculus stumble on the quantity-sense that infants master without instruction. Here's what the gap tells us about the architecture of learning.
Raf Delgado·
Babies bind sight, sound, and touch into a single unified percept before they can sit up. State-of-the-art multimodal AI encodes each modality separately and calls it integration. Here's why the gap matters — and what it would actually take to close it.
Raf Delgado·
Transformers compute attention over millions of tokens simultaneously. Children pay attention through their bodies, their predictions, their mistakes. The gap between the two reveals something deep about what attention actually is — and why embodied AI keeps failing in kitchens.
Raf Delgado·
Children are intuitive causal scientists — they poke, tilt, and intervene to figure out why things happen. AI systems, despite their power, still can't quite do this. Here's why the gap matters.
Raf Delgado·