> In particular it takes several months for these previously blind children to learn to distinguish faces from non faces. I recall a pop science article which I can't find the source for now that explained that people with newly acquired sight struggle to predict the border of non moving objects, though they can typically accurately predict border of moving objects and over time they learn to predict for stationary.
We already know all of this from infants - it takes a few months to distinguish faces from non-faces, they take even longer to predict the future position of an object in motion ...
But, they still don't require millions of training data. At 3 months in toddlers, with a training set restricted to only their immediate family, can reliably differentiate between faces and tables in different light, with different expressions/positions without needing to first process millions of faces, tables and other objects.
> So yes after a lifetime of video humans can quickly learn to distinquish animals they've never seen before with a few examples,
Not a lifetime, toddlers do this with less than half a dozen images. Sometimes even less if it's a toy.
> And compounding this is that a newborn while not having themselves experienced anything is born with a brain that's the result of millions of years of evolution filled with lifetimes of experience.
Not, they are not filled with "experience". They are filled with a set of characteristics that were shaped by the environment over maybe millions of generations. There's literally zero experience, all there is in that brain, is instincts, not knowledge.
To learn to speak and understand English at the level of a three year old[1] requires training data: the data used by a 3yo baby is miniscule, almost a rounding error, compared to the data used to train any current network.
I'm not making any claims about how long something takes, just how much training data is needed.
I'm specifically addressing the assertion that with 100x more resources, we could do much better, and my counterpoint to that assertion is that there is no indication that 100x more resources are needed because the current tech is taking millions of times more training data than toddlers do, to recognise facts.
My short counterargument is: "We are already using millions of times more resources than humans to get a worse result, why would using 100x more resources than we are currently using make a big difference?"
I think we may be approaching a local maxima with current techniques.
[1] I've got a three year old, and I'm constantly amazed each time I see a performance of (for example) ChatGPT and realise that for each word[2] heard by my 3yo since birth, ChatGPT "heard" a few hundred thousand more words, and yet if a 3yo could talk and knows the facts that I ask about, they'd easily be able to keep a sensible conversation going that would be very similar to ChatGPT.
[2] Duplicates included, of course.