Sentient? Google LaMDA feels like a typical chat bot

LaMDA is a software program that runs on Google TPU chips. Like the classic brain in a jar, some would argue the code and the circuits don't form a sentient entity because none of it engages in life. Google engineer Blake Lemoine caused controversy last week by releasing a document that he had circulated to colleagues in which Lemoine urged Google to consider that one of its deep learning AI programs, LaMDA, might be "sentient." Google replied by officially denying the likelihood of sentience in the program, and Lemoine was put on paid administrative leave by Google, according to an interview with Lemoine by Nitasha Tiku of The Washington Post. There has been a flood of responses to Lemoine's claim by AI scholars. University of Washington linguistics professor Emily Bender, a frequent critic of AI hype, told Tiku that Lemoine is projecting anthropocentric views onto the technology. "We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them," Bender told Tiku. In an interview with MSNBC's Zeeshan Aleem, AI scholar Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, observed that the concept of sentience has not been rigorously explored. Mitchell concludes the program is not sentient, however, "by any reasonable meaning of that term, and the reason is because I understand pretty well how the system works."