Deep down, I know it's not thinking exactly this chat bot I'm testing out, but it's a pretty

convincing imitation.

I know, or I think I know, that the large language model behind it is really just crunching

massive amounts of data to predict the next word to say

and ultimately tell me what I want to hear or what I asked for. But wait a second, is that kind of

what my brain is doing all the time too? Welcome to the Quantum podcast where we explore

the frontiers of science and math.

I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quantum Magazine.

For the inaugural episode of our new podcast, we're going to be talking about AIs and human brains and exploring how different and maybe a little alike they actually are.

The language of human thought, intelligence, learning, neurons, even hallucination, is built

into the way we talk about AI today.

So when we were planning a recent special issue about how AI is changing math and the

sciences, we wanted to ask whether

it's accurate or useful or troublesome to think of AI and language models in particular in these

terms.

I'm here with the author of one of the pieces from this package, which compared artificial neural networks with networks

made of actual neurons. It's Quanta, staff writer, Yasmin, Saplikolu. Welcome, Yasmin, to the show.

Thanks for having me and letting me nerd out about this. I'm excited to nerd out about this.

So one of the questions we like to ask going into these interviews is what's the big question

here?

Where are we going to end up at the end of our conversation?

So the big question, you have these incredible AI systems and you have this incredible

...