Over the weekend, a Google engineer on its Responsible AI team made the claim that the company’s LaMDA conversation technology is “sentient.”
Over the weekend, a Google engineer on its Responsible AI team made the claim that the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) conversation technology is “sentient.” Experts in the field, as well as Google, disagree with that assessment. Google announced LaMDA at I/O 2021 as a “breakthrough conversation technology” that can:
LaMDA is trained on large amounts of dialogue and has “picked up on several of the nuances that distinguish open-ended conversation,” like sensible and specific responses that encourage further back-and-forth. Other qualities Google is exploring include “interestingness” – assessing whether responses are insightful, unexpected or witty – and “factuality,” or sticking to facts.
