Dr. Chris Summerfield is a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist, and author of These Strange New Minds — a groundbreaking exploration of whether machines like ChatGPT are starting to think, and what that reveals about human intelligence itself.
Summerfield has spent his career studying how the brain perceives, predicts, abstracts, and decides — and now he's using that knowledge to decode how artificial systems are learning to do the same, often without being told how.
Expect to learn why your brain might just be doing autocomplete on reality, how AI systems are starting to mirror human thought through pure prediction, why large language models can form meaning without understanding, how intelligence might just be compression, why abstraction is the secret weapon of both humans and machines, how AIs trained on language are learning the structure of the world, what it means that they’re beginning to talk to each other, whether these systems could develop agency, and why the most profound insights about our own minds may come from the machines we’ve built — and no longer fully understand.
Timestamps:
01:40 The Evolution of Deep Learning
04:41 Language Generation Breakthroughs
07:43 Human vs AI Language Production
10:49 Neuroscience and Language Models
13:45 The Journey to Computational Neuroscience
16:26 Neuro-AI: Bridging Two Fields
19:52 Understanding Neural Networks and the Brain
22:46 Neural Manifolds and Their Significance
25:36 The Impact of AI on Neuroscience
28:43 Future Directions in Neuro-AI
32:31 Exploring Foundation Models in Behavioral Science
37:49 Understanding and Misunderstanding AI Outputs
42:42 The Rise of Multimodal AI Models
46:36 AI Safety and Ethical Considerations
59:11 Aligning AI with Human Values
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📚 RECOMMENDED READING
These Strange New Minds: https://amzn.to/4jKowBO
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