What Is Google LaMDA & Why Did Someone Believe It's Sentient?

LaMDA has been in the news after a Google engineer claimed it was sentient because its answers allegedly hint that it understands what it is. The engineer also suggested that LaMDA communicates that it has fears, much like a human does. What is LaMDA, and why are some under the impression that it can achieve consciousness? LaMDA is a language model. Fundamentally, it's a mathematical function (or a statistical tool) that describes a possible outcome related to predicting what the next words are in a sequence.