Modern AI is blowing everybody's mind, but is it intelligent in the same way as the human brain.

And could AI reach sentience?

And how would we know when it gets there?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University.

And I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works

and how we experience life.

Like most brain researchers, I've been obsessed with questions of intelligence and consciousness.

How do these arise from collections of billions of cells in our brains? And could intelligence

and consciousness arise in artificial brains, say on chat GPT? Those are the questions that we're

going to attack today. Early efforts to figure out the brain looked at all the billions of cells

and the trillions of

connections and said, look, what if we just think of each cell as a unit? And each unit is

connected to other units. And where they connect, which is called the synapse or one cell gives

a little signal to the next cell, what if we just looked at that

like a simple connection that has a strength between zero and one? Or zero means there's no

connection and one means it's the strongest possible connection. So this was a massive

oversimplification of the very complicated biology. But it allowed people to start thinking

about networks and writing down different ways that you could put artificial neural networks together.

And for more than 50 years now, people have been doing research to show how artificial neural

networks can do really cool things.

It's a totally new kind of way of doing computation.

...