6 articles
Reading is an evolutionary hack — no brain region was born for it, and no child learns it without years of effortful, phonologically grounded work. LLMs never had to do any of that. The difference turns out to matter enormously.
Theo Kask·
Children say "goed" and "maked" because they extracted a rule. That's not an error — it's a generalization engine in action. Here's why the same thing that makes kids say wrong things is exactly what AI still can't do right.
Maren Solis·
Children spend years learning that language rarely means what it literally says. LLMs can generate grammatically perfect sentences — but whether they understand what those sentences actually do in conversation is a different, harder question.
Theo Kask·
Russian speakers distinguish blues faster than English speakers do — because Russian draws a categorical boundary English doesn't. LLMs are trained on language too. But what gets shaped, and what doesn't, reveals a surprising asymmetry.
Maren Solis·
Bilingual children develop metalinguistic superpowers by navigating two languages. AI systems can "speak" hundreds — and understand none the way humans do. The question isn't just neuroscience. It's about whose languages we're choosing to build into our systems, and what we're telling children when we don't.
Jules Okafor·
Stories aren't just how humans communicate — they're how we think. Language models can predict your brain's response to a sentence. They still can't tell a story. Here's why the gap is wider than it looks.
Maren Solis·