The home team chats with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs—and humans—learn to speak. Plus: how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to talk, concern over models that pass the Turing test, and what’s going on with whale brains.

Eira May

It feels like programming would be a lot less intimidating if the vocabulary used to describe operators was closer to what the average person learned in school. Learning to concatenate a string sounds difficult. Putting a bunch of words together in a certain order, now that sounds approachable!

Ben Popper