Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way. | Quanta Magazine

Learning a language can’t be that hard — every baby in the world manages to do it in a few years. Figuring out how the process works is another story. Linguists have devised elaborate theories to explain it, but recent advances in machine learning have added a new wrinkle. When computer scientists began building the language models that power modern chatbots like ChatGPT, they set aside decades of research in linguistics, and their gamble seemed to pay off. But are their creations…