You can't count by text, because text is not the only thing children learn on. So unlike the bytes comparison the text comparison is totally invalid.
> We happen to feed only distilled data to LLMs though. That's why they appear so efficient.
That is wild handwaving that really explains nothing.
But then, most of the comments on this page are wild handwaving, pontificating like a blind man describing an elephant. Very little engages with or matches the quality of Norvig's arguments.
Have you ever had kids? Either you never had, you forgot, or you are intentionally deceiving us (and perhaps yourself) to support your point. If you never had kids, I can tell you you have very poor imagination about how they learn language.