[quietbritishjim]

The real difference with human learning is feedback: when young humans learn, at least some of the time they are interacting with intelligent agents that are able to give them focused feedback on their recent inputs and initial reactions to them.

[nicklecompte]

I think this ignores the most essential feedback very young humans get: planet Earth itself obeys laws of physics, mathematics, logic, etc. And by age 2 human children already have far faster and deeper reasoning abilities than any contemporary AI, even if their lack of linguistic knowledge means they wouldn't perform very well on LLM benchmarks.

In general AI researchers have done a very bad job exploring how a system might be "near-human" according to some fancy linguistic benchmark, yet dramatically dumber than a pigeon in terms of general reasoning abilities.