Google engineer Blake Lemoine was placed on administrative leave after he claimed that LaMDA, a language model created by Google AI, had become sentient and begun reasoning like a human being. Here, we will explore what LaMDA is, how it works, and what makes an engineer working on it think it has become sentient. LaMDA or Language Models for Dialog Applications is a machine-learning language model created by Google as a chatbot that is supposed to mimic humans in conversation. Like BERT, GPT-3 and other language models, LaMDA is built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google invented and open-sourced in 2017. Models trained on language can propagate that misuse — for instance, by internalizing biases, mirroring hateful speech, or replicating misleading information.

Source: Washington Post June 13, 2022 08:35 UTC