Could artificial intelligence become sentient?
A Google engineer is arguing that his firm’s AI has done so
IT IS ONE of the oldest tropes in science fiction. On June 11th the Washington Post reported that an engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, had been suspended from his job for arguing that the firm’s “LaMDA” artificial-intelligence (AI) model may have become sentient. The newspaper quotes Mr Lemoine as saying: “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics.” Has LaMDA achieved sentience? And if not, might another machine do so one day?
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From the June 18th 2022 edition
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