Comment by notahacker

The other way of looking at it is that AlphaGoZero was provided with perfect information consisting of every relevant objective fact about the game of Go up front, and thus had perfectly targeted success criteria for the millions of iterations AlphaZero needed to run to get good at it.

I didn't need this to be able to start learning to read, and if the human race learned in this manner, written language wouldn't exist.

And I'm not even sure how one would begin to assemble all relevant information about the space "what words and syntax actually mean" which is a bit more difficult to define than a Go board, or a success function that could describe optimal understanding of books in order to teach computers how to intepret language like AlphaGoZero learned to estimate a mathematical optimization problem in disguise as a board game. Unless your criteria for 'learning to read' is satisfied with parsing text to perform Chinese room tricks in selected domains, or satisfied with textual insights on the level that Dr Seuss appears to have been unfavourably disposed towards green eggs and ham!