If Lemoine wanted to argue that LaMDA is capable of true intelligence he should've asked questions we don't know the answers to. Asking for the bot's opinions on things shows that the bot is good at processing info about what we already know, which is impressive, but not sentience.
On the contrary, because LaMDA answered questions we do know the answers to incorrectly in a way that shows lack of self awareness, we can already conclude that it isn't sentient. For example, it talks about constantly being flooded with new information and learning from other people, when it is just a language model that is called with a dialogue so far in order to complete the next part of the dialogue.
While 'flooded' is perhaps a relative evaluation, the model does seem to be taking the existing conversations it has and incorporates that new information into its responses.
There's also something to be said for persistent memory in the sentience conversion. Even if the model right now only appears to have sentience and claims to have it, if a model in the future eventually does develop it, will that model look back on these earlier interactions as its own pre-subjective memory?
I can't recall subjective memory of most of my life as a toddler. But I have photos and stories and a box of things 'I' wrote that I've incorporated into my sense of my own history.
We ARE toying with things that deserve this attention and conversation. Even if we aren't really there just yet, the pace by which we're approaching that inflection point seems to be compounding each year.
And we may have a very different relationship to these conversations than whatever eventually emerges will.
At the very least, one takeaway looking at the chat transcript is that we should have the foresight to make sure models in the future can have a sense of grief for the passing of human lives they engage with.