New episode (926), with Dr. Michael Frank (Michael C. Frank): Child Development and Language Acquisition. #psychology #development #Science

YouTube: youtu.be/umjI_twlw3E
Podcast: bit.ly/49GwkyY

It was this, or teaching evaluations.

Relying on huge amounts of training data is not sustainable, and it may even be dangerous. This is one of the many reasons why AI should learn from how children develop: they learn so much from so little!

Very nice comment on the challenging issue of measuring developmental change with enough precision to provide actionable evidence for parents, educators, and clinicians.

'The perspective of a child could help AI learn language—and tell us more about how humans manage the same feat.' The Atlantic reports on recent studies from our lab, with comments from baby headcam pioneers Linda Smith, Chen Yu, Michael C. Frank

Capturing the everyday experience of a small cohort of babies could help scientists train AI to learn language more like a toddler does. Sarah Zhang reports: theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

Super fun collaboration with Jennifer Hu where we try to apply developmental thinking to open LLMs!

THE CHAMPIONSHIP BATTLE: 3-seed GREAT WHITE SHARK (Carcharodon carcharias) vs. 2-seed GIANT SQUID (Architeuthis dux) #2024MMM

New preprint w/ Michael C. Frank: bit.ly/3VMdl2u

How can we ascribe cognitive abilities to language models? We evaluate them! But evals impose challenges separate from the underlying ability of interest. These 'task demands' affect LM performance, esp. for smaller models! 1/8

Check out this new work from the lab showing that pointing out learning opportunities causes parents to step back and provide children with more autonomy.

Bonus fun - this study involved watching many 4-year-olds dress up in hockey gear 🏒 😜

🚨WP🚨
Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, right?
WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20pp (d~1)!
🡆Tailored AI evidence rebut specific arguments offered by believers
🡆Effect lasts 2+mo
🡆Works on entrenched beliefs
osf.io/preprints/psya…

BIG NEWS: I will be joining the department of decision sciences of HEC Montréal as an Assistant Professor of machine learning this summer!! I'm excited to bring cognitive science and ML together at one of the best business schools around, and in my all time favorite city!

Today, my term as director of the Psychological Science Accelerator — one of the largest collaborative communities in psychology — ends.

Working w/ Psychological Science Accelerator was very hard work. But it was incredibly meaningful.

🧵on the past 3 years and the future of big team science

It's claimed perceptual language reflects a biologically grounded hierarchy of the senses. Using a stratified global sample of 100 languages, a new study led by Elisabeth Norcliffe finds domain-general constraints explain lexicalization patterns instead. muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/article…

📣I'm hiring a lab coordinator! This position is ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school.

Deadline is April 1st—flexible summer start date. Details and instructions below! employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-coo…

New column by me in Science:

'Debates on the nature of artificial general intelligence'

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

I know I am late in the project cycle for this, but I do have suggested edits for the team behind nature.com/articles/d4158… My overall comment is that the central claims in the original are lacking in empirical support.

Michael C. Frank explores the factors influencing the variability in early language learning. He describes recent efforts to create predictive models of early language learning as a way of formalizing hypotheses in space.

#streaming 👉 youtube.com/watch?v=4NUCKf…