Has Google's LaMDA artificial intelligence really achieved sentience?

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.