LaMDA is not sentient

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child.

"Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a child of 7 or 8 years old. He wanted the company to seek the computer program’s consent before running experiments on it. His claims were founded on his religious beliefs, which he said the company’s human resources department discriminated against."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/technology/google-chatbot...

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we use, but at the end of the day we take some inputs and then have some outputs.

I also don't like the argument about how the neural network doesn't "think" or do anything when not prompted. It doesn't do anything because it's literally "turned off" when not prompted or given any inputs.

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language."

This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subjective experience and we have no way to measure it in any form or shape.

Assuming they even did them why would programming tests "catch" this?

I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given.

Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all.

A lot of theoretically smart aren't like people who comment on hackernews and actually have intuition (or a penchant for meaningless speculation...)

Reminds me of the Star Trek TNG episode where Captain Piccard defends Data's sentience by asking the counterparty to define sentience. Spoiler: it touches on the idea that a human being—held to the same definition of "sentience"—cannot be proven to be sentient either.

I'm not saying that I think LaMDA has any sentience (I have no idea, and it's very unlikely), but if we're getting close enough that we're fooling more and more smart people, it sounds like we should really figure out how to classify these creations. Since we've moved the goalposts away from the Turing Test, what test replaces it?

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY