This podcast episode #2 , "The Foundations of Generative AI," explains the core models driving this technology. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are compared to a forger and detective improving iteratively. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are described as creatively manipulating existing data. Large Language Models (LLMs) process massive text data to generate human-like text. Diffusion Models reverse a noise-adding process to create images. The episode concludes by illustrating these models' applications in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DALL-E, and explaining the basic input-training-generation-output workflow of generative AI.