Will writers and artists and musicians become unemployed by AI?

What are the new capabilities that we're seeing all around us?

And what is this going to mean for human creativity?

And what does this have to do with diamonds and Westworld and effort and

Frankenstein and Beethoven and the Stark family in Game of Thrones?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and in this episode, I get to

dive into something that's right at the intersection of science and creativity.

Most of my podcasts are about evergreen topics about our brains and our psychology,

but there's something so extraordinary happening right now.

We're in the middle of a revolution with AI and what's called generative AI in particular.

So I'm going to do a two-part episode on this. For today, I'm going to dig into what generative AI in particular. So I'm going to do a two-part episode on this. For today, I'm going to dig into what generative AI is and what it means for human creativity. And then in the next episode, I'm going to tackle the question of sentience. Are these AIs conscious? And if not now, could they be soon? And how would we know when we get there?

So let's start in 2017 when almost no one in the world paid attention when a team at Google Brain introduced a new way of building an artificial neural

network. So this was different than the architectures that came before it, which were called

things like convolutional neural networks and recurring neural networks. Instead, they presented

a new model that was called a transformer.

Now, a transformer is not one of those robots that shape shift into trucks and helicopters.

Instead, a transformer model is a way to tackle sequential data, like the words that are in a sentence or the frames in a video. And a transformer model takes in everything at once,

and it essentially pays attention to different parts of the data.

And this allows training on enormous datasets,

bigger than what was trained on before.

Like now, it's essentially everything that has been written by humans that is on the

internet, which is petabytes of data. So these models, they digest all of that. And what do they

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