A Google developer recently decided that one of the company's chatbots, a large language model (LLM) called LaMBDA, had become sentient. According to a report in the Washington Post, the developer identifies as a Christian and he believes that the machine has something akin to a soul -- that it's become sentient. As is always the case, the "is it alive?" We don't want to dunk on anyone here at Neural, but it's flat out dangerous to put these kinds of ideas in people's heads. The more we, as a society, pretend that we're "thiiiis close" to creating sentient machines, the easier it'll be for bad actors, big tech, and snake oil startups to manipulate us with false claims about machine learning systems.

Thousands of artificial intelligence experts and machine learning researchers probably thought they were going to have a restful weekend. Then came Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who told the Washington Post on Saturday that he believed LaMDA, Google's conversational AI for generating chatbots based on large language models (LLM), was sentient. Lemoine, who worked for Google's Responsible AI organization until he was placed on paid leave last Monday, and who "became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult," had begun testing LaMDA to see if it used discriminatory or hate speech. Instead, Lemoine began "teaching" LaMDA transcendental meditation, asked LaMDA its preferred pronouns, leaked LaMDA transcripts and explained in a Medium response to the Post story: "It's a good article for what it is but in my opinion it was focused on the wrong person. Her story was focused on me when I believe it would have been better if it had been focused on one of the other people she interviewed. Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person."

Then came Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who told the Washington Post on Saturday that he believed LaMDA, Google's conversational AI for generating chatbots based on large language models (LLM), was sentient. Lemoine, who worked for Google's Responsible AI organization until he was placed on paid leave last Monday, and who "became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult," had begun testing LaMDA to see if it used discriminatory or hate speech. Instead, Lemoine began "teaching" LaMDA transcendental meditation, asked LaMDA its preferred pronouns, leaked LaMDA transcripts and explained in a Medium response to the Post story: "It's a good article for what it is but in my opinion it was focused on the wrong person. Her story was focused on me when I believe it would have been better if it had been focused on one of the other people she interviewed. Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person."

Google AI researcher Blake Lemoine was recently placed on administrative leave after going public with claims that LaMDA, a large language model designed to converse with people, was sentient. At one point, according to reporting by The Washington Post, Lemoine went so far as to demand legal representation for the LaMDA; he has said his beliefs about LaMDA's personhood are based on his faith as a Christian and the model telling him it had a soul. The prospect of AI that's smarter than people gaining consciousness is routinely discussed by people like Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, particularly with efforts to train large language models by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia in recent years. Discussions of whether language models can be sentient date back to ELIZA, a relatively primitive chatbot made in the 1960s. But with the rise of deep learning and ever-increasing amounts of training data, language models have become more convincing at generating text that appears as if it was written by a person. Recent progress has led to claims that language models are foundational to artificial general intelligence, the point at which software will display humanlike abilities to a range of environments and tasks, and transfer knowledge between them.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Thousands of artificial intelligence experts and machine learning researchers probably thought they were going to have a restful weekend. Then came Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who told the Washington Post on Saturday that he believed LaMDA, Google's conversational AI for generating chatbots based on large language models (LLM), was sentient. Lemoine, who worked for Google's Responsible AI organization until he was placed on paid leave last Monday, and who "became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult," had begun testing LaMDA to see if it used discriminatory or hate speech. Instead, Lemoine began "teaching" LaMDA transcendental meditation, asked LaMDA its preferred pronouns, leaked LaMDA transcripts and explained in a Medium response to the Post story: "It's a good article for what it is but in my opinion it was focused on the wrong person. Her story was focused on me when I believe it would have been better if it had been focused on one of the other people she interviewed. Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person."

Olivia Liao is Senior Director of Data Science at Stitch Fix, a company that uses data science and expert stylists to deliver personalization at scale. We discuss how they blend data science and domain expertise, how they tune recommendations in light of logistics and supply chain constraints, and how they incorporate new developments in large language models, multimodal models and Responsible AI.

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Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies. Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech. LaMDA is "built by fine-tuning a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, with up to 137 billion model parameters, and teaching the models to leverage external knowledge sources," according to Google. It is what the company uses to build chatbots and returns apparently meaningful answers to inquiries based on material harvested from trillions of internet conversations and other communications. At some point during his investigation, however, Lemoine appears to have started to believe that the AI was expressing signs of sentience.

The suspended Google software engineer at the center of claims that the search engine's artificial intelligence language tool LaMDA is sentient has said the technology is "intensely worried that people are going to be afraid of it and wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity". The new claim by Blake Lemoine was made in an interview published on Monday amid intense pushback from AI experts that artificial learning technology is anywhere close to meeting an ability to perceive or feel things. The Canadian language development theorist Steven Pinker described Lemoine's claims as a "ball of confusion". "One of Google's (former) ethics experts doesn't understand the difference between sentience (AKA subjectivity, experience), intelligence, and self-knowledge. The scientist and author Gary Marcus said Lemoine's claims were "Nonsense". "Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.

A Google engineer has reportedly been placed on suspension from the company after claim that an artificial intelligence (AI) he helped to develop had become sentient. "If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid," Blake Lemoine told the Washington Post. Lemoine released transcripts of conversations with with the AI, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), in which it appears to express fears of being switched off, talk about how it feels happy and sad, and attempts to form bonds with humans by talking about situations that it could never have actually experienced. Here's everything you need to know. In a word, no, says Adrian Weller at the Alan Turing Institute.