The Download: kids outlearning AI, and space travel agents

August 24, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why Teaching a computer to use human language requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times…

Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why

August 24, 2026
People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child.  Now there are two.  Four short years after the release of ChatGPT,…