In June 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines by claiming the company’s LaMDA chatbot had achieved sentience. The software had the conversational ability of a precocious seven-year-old, Lemoine said, and we should assume it possessed a similar awareness of the world.
LaMDA, later released to the public as Bard, is powered by a “large language model” (LLM) of the kind that also forms the engine of OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot. Other big tech companies are rushing to deploy similar technology.
