"A new study suggests that babies’ brains are not as immature as previously believed; instead, they utilize their period of postnatal
The researchers used brain imaging and found that many systems in the human infant’s brain are already functioning and processing the rich streams of information from the senses. This contradicts the long-held belief that many infant brain systems are too immature to function.
The team then compared learning in humans with the latest machine learning models, where deep neural networks benefit from a ‘helpless’ period of pre-training.
“We propose that human infants similarly use the ‘helpless’ period in infancy to pre-train, learning powerful foundation models, which go on to underpin cognition in later life with high performance and rapid generalization. This is very similar to the powerful machine learning models that have led to the big breakthroughs in generative AI in recent years, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini,” Prof. Cusack explained.
The researchers say that future research on how babies learn could well inspire the next generation of AI models."
SciTechDaily