Two Stanford heavyweights have weighed in on the fiery AI sentience debate -- and the duo is firmly in the "BS" corner. The wrangle recently rose to a crescendo over arguments about Google's LaMDA system. Developer Blake Lemoine sparked the controversy. Lemoine, who worked for Google's Responsible AI team, had been testing whether the large-language model (LLM) used harmful speech. The 41-year-old told The Washington Post that his conversations with the AI convinced him that it had a sentient mind.

In the race to harness the power of cloud computing, and further develop artificial intelligence, academics have a new concern: falling behind a fast-moving tech industry. In the US, 22 higher education institutions, including Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, have signed up to a National Research Cloud initiative seeking access to the computational power they need to keep up. It is one of several cloud projects being called for by academics globally, and is being explored by the US Congress, given the potential of the technology to deliver breakthroughs in healthcare and climate change. Under the US proposal, authored by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, a national cloud platform would enable more academic and industry researchers to work at the leading edge of AI, and help train a new generation of experts. Li and Etchemendy's NRC proposal cautions about declining government funding for basic and foundational research and highlights the US's history of federally funding research into innovations -- from gene sequencing to the internet itself.

The Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence started with a conversation between two neighbors, in their driveways: John Etchemendy, PhD '82, a philosopher, and Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist. Li expressed her growing discomfort that the people creating AI--primarily white men--were not representative of the millions affected by it. "Throughout human history," Li says, "every time something is invented or produced, if we're not careful, it favors a particular group. My favorite example is scissors. Humans have been using scissors for thousands of years, but they were designed for right-handed people."