Knowledge and accuracy: LaMDA can access the internet for the latest information, while both GPT-3 and even GPT-4 have knowledge cut-off dates of September 2021. If asked about more up-to-date events, these models could generate fictional responses. Training data: LaMDA's training dataset comprised primarily of dialog, while GPT-3 used everything from Wikipedia entries to traditional books. That makes GPT-3 more general-purpose and adaptable for applications like ChatGPT. Human training: In the previous section, we talked about how Google hired human workers to fine-tune its model for safety and quality.

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.