AI And The Limits Of Language

Jacob Browning is a postdoc in NYU's Department of Computer Science working on the philosophy of AI. Yann LeCun is a Turing Award-winning machine learning researcher and an NYU Silver professor. When a Google engineer recently declared Google's AI chatbot a person, pandemonium ensued. The chatbot, LaMDA, is a large language model (LLM) that is designed to predict the likely next words to whatever lines of text it is given. Since many conversations are somewhat predictable, these systems can infer how to keep a conversation going productively. LaMDA did this so impressively that the engineer, Blake Lemoine, began to wonder about whether there was a ghost in the machine.