Explained: Why a senior Google engineer claimed its AI-based chatbot LaMDA is ‘sentient’ | Explained News,The Indian Express
In a blog post, Blake Lemoine – who has since been placed on administrative leave – termed the AI chatbot LaMDA “a person”. According to a report by The Washington Post, Lemoine started chatting with LaMDA in 2021 on topics including religion, consciousness and robotics and concluded that the chatbot had become “sentient”.
A senior engineer at Google claimed that the company’s artificial intelligence-based chatbot Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) had become “sentient”. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, published a blog post labelling LaMDA as a “person” after having conversations with the AI bot on subjects like religion, consciousness and robotics. The claims have also spurred a debate on the capabilities and limitations of AI-based chatbots and if they can actually hold a conversation akin to human beings.
Here is an explainer on Google’s LaMDA, why its engineer believed it to be sentient, why he has been sent on leave and where the other AI-based text bots are:
What is LaMDA?
Google first announced LaMDA at its flagship developer conference I/O in 2021 as its generative language model for dialogue applications which can ensure that the Assistant would be able to converse on any topic. In the company’s own words, the tool can “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications”.
In simple terms, it means that LaMDA can have a discussion based on a user’s inputs thanks completely to its language processing models which have been trained on large amounts of dialogue. Last year, the company had showcased how the LaMDA-inspired model would allow Google Assistant to have a conversation around which shoes to wear while hiking in the snow.
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