Dr. Gašper Beguš is a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics who studies the interface between human, machine, and animal language. We head into the conversation with a question - is there something fundamentally different about the way that humans learn and the way that machines like LLMs learn? Vector embeddings of the relatedness of language and the map that we carry in our heads of abstract concepts don’t seem that different at the end of the day. This leads us into a discussion of the ways in which humans acquire language, how language evolves, evidence for abstract thought in animals, where the bright line of consciousness can be drawn, and if taking a different approach to training computers to think can generate a machine that can match us in drive and curiosity.