What makes this AI paper different

4:08the pod. He um went to college with us at Princeton undergrad. Then I think he went to Berkeley for a PhD and then came to UCLA and now has like a gig with UCLA and USC as a postdoc. Um he's also the brain scientist on Instagram and TikTok. He's got a bunch of followers, really into science communication. You guys should check out his um page. It's really, really cool. So, what the cool thing about this paper, the cool thing that Daniel did, was he used AI to reverse engineer the biological mechanism of unconsciousness in coma patients. And the way that he used AI is very different from, I think,

4:49when people think about using AI to do science, they think like, oh, black box LLM model, I like trained it on a bunch of data and then it's going to spit out like a classifier, consciousness or not consciousness. There's part of that here, but what really, I think, is cool about it is there's the AI has rediscovered known features of unconsciousness and then it's also predicted two entirely new biological mechanisms because the way that he has engineered this AI is it's not a black box. There's actual mechanistic understanding about a model of the human brain that he's hardcoded in and that's what the AI is sort of

5:30acting on. That's what the evolution of the AI is acting on. And we're we're going to get into that, but I think it's it's very, very cool. And the implications are in every direction. I I just want to make a quick uh uh note here. >> Yeah. We use the term AI in a very general sense when we discuss on the pod. It is a very expansive area of research with a lot of different subcategories and sub boxes. So, a lot of times we will just say AI for shorthand because we have a lot to get to. Um but we don't mean AI equals LLM when we do so. It is sort of talking about the entire field of research at at a high level and we then get into the

6:11weeds of what we're talking about specifically. Um but it's just as a small caveat, I know that's important because it is a vast vast space that is beyond just chatbots. Exactly. And this is this is very much not a chatbot. It's very very cool. We're going to get into it, right? And the implications I think radiate in all directions, right? Something like 5,500 Americans currently are in a persistent vegetative state. And there's a larger number that's in a minimally conscious state. And this research offers a genuine scientific pathway towards treatment. From the philosophy of mind perspective, it provides like a very mechanistic specific picture of what makes a brain conscious. And then from for an AI perspective,

6:52it's also very cool to think about how one can use underlying principles of AI architectures to understand something as complicated as consciousness, right? So, it's a deeply personal question that I think this is answering. Like consciousness is the one thing I think that we can all be sure exists because at least we experience it. It's the Descartes I think therefore I am. Clearly consciousness is a thing. Maybe the world isn't. Right. >> And um quantum fields aren't, but consciousness like 100% like I I am me, right? Sitting here talking in this microphone. And you are you and everybody agrees that like that is a thing. So, it's it's a deeply personal question um and it's still a phenomenon