Hey, this is David Eagleman, and this past week was my birthday, so I took a week off.

So I'm going to run an episode that I did earlier.

Episode number seven, this is called Is AI Actually Intelligent?

And how would we know if it gets there?

This episode is from one year ago, but as time goes on, this becomes more and more relevant.

So please enjoy, and I will see you next week with a new episode.

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

...