'Sentient' artificial intelligence: Have we reached peak AI hype?

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! 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.