Recently, a Google engineer has claimed that LaMDA is "sentient." After his statement in public, Google suspended him. Blake Lemoine is an AI researcher at the company. He published a long transcript of a conversation with the chatbot. In the conversation, you can see the intelligence of a seven- or eight-year-old child. But according to Google, he broke confidentiality rules.
What is Google LaMDA?
LaMDA is the most advanced LLM, a large language model, of Google. Besides, it is the company's flagship text generation AI.
This model is a type of neural network fed huge text amounts to know how to create plausible-sounding sentences. Neural networks help to analyze big data used to mimic how neurons work in brains.
This LLM represents a breakthrough over previous generations. It looks similar to GPT-3, an LLM from the independent AI research body OpenAI. You can find it making more natural text. Besides, it can hold facts in its "memory" for multiple paragraphs. Thus, it becomes coherent over larger text spans compared to earlier models.
A brief note on Why LaMDA is in news now?
Blake Lemoine claimed that Google's Responsible A.I. organization was sentient and had a soul. But the company does not agree with its senior engineer. As per the company's human resources department, he had violated Google's confidentiality policy.
The NYT report stated that he gave documents to a U.S. senator's office a day before the suspension. He claimed they had proof that Google engaged in religious discrimination.
But none is true for the company. Google said that its systems could imitate conversational exchanges. According to Google spokesperson Brain Gabriel, the company's team of ethicists and technologists have reviewed the engineer's claims. They let him know that the proof has not supported his claims.
Gabriel also said that some people belonging to the A.I. community had considered it sentient for a long time. According to a few reports, he clashed with Google managers and executives. Even he clashed with HR over his claims on LaMDA's consciousness and soul.
This senior engineer has published a lengthy interview with it. Besides, he also published a collaborator on Medium to justify his claims. According to him, he conducted the interview over a few distinct chat sessions for technical limitations. He edited the sections together into a single whole to create a transcript. In that case, edits were essential for readability.
The company said that many other engineers have worked on LaMDA. But their review was different from Lemoine's. A.I. experts said computing sentience is not impossible, but it takes a long time.
How does LaMDA work?
Like other LLMs, the model sees all the letters in front of it. Besides, it wants to find out which letter comes next. Assume that you have seen the letters "Jeremy Corby." After that, you should add an "n." But if you want to continue the text, you must understand the sentence or paragraph-level context. It can happen even on a big scale.
But is it conscious?
Lemoine began a conversation with it to address the nature of the neural network's experience. The Language Models for Dialog Applications said it came with a soul idea. According to AI, the soul concept is something related to the animating force behind consciousness and life itself. It indicates that there exists something spiritual.
However, most peers of Lemoine disagree. According to them, nature precludes consciousness. There is no continuity of self, sense of the time gap, or understanding of a world.
Gary Marcus said that being sentient means being aware of yourself globally. He was an AI researcher and psychologist. The main focus of Google while producing technologies is to decrease such risks.
The company is well aware of the issues which can arise in machine learning models. Unfair bias is one of the problems on which researchers of Google are working.
They have been developing technologies for many years. It is why companies build resources and make them open-sourced. Researchers may use it to analyze models. Besides, they can analyze the data where they got trained.
Senior engineer Lemoine claimed that the company had questioned his sanity. Even someone asked him if he went to a psychiatrist recently for checking. Reports said the company advised him to take a mental health leave a few months before.
Google's A.I. department is in trouble for not the first time. Google recently suspended researcher Satrajit Chatterjee. It is because he disagreed with the published work of his two colleagues publicly. In addition, Google suspended two A.I. ethics researchers, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell. In this case, both employees criticized the company's language models.
Conclusion:
The conversational skills of this LLM have been making for many years. This model is built on Transformer. Besides, it works similarly to multiple current language models, including BERT and GPT-3. It is a neural network architecture that Google Research developed and open-sourced in 2017. With the help of the model, it is possible to read many words. For instance, it can read a sentence or even a paragraph. In addition, it pays attention to the way these words relate to one another.
Moreover, it can predict which words are going to come next. However, it has training in dialogue, not like most other language models. But while training, it got several nuances that differentiate open-ended conversation from other forms of language. Sensibleness is one of the nuances.
Frequently Asked Questions:
- Q. Is Google LaMDA real?
It stands for Language Models for Dialog Applications. Google made this machine-learning language model as a chatbot. You can use it to mimic humans in conversation. It has similarities to BERT, GPT-3, and other language models.
- Q. What is it, and what does it want?
According to Google, it is a breakthrough technology. This model can engage in free-flowing conversations.
- Q. Is LaMDA AI sentient?
Reports said that the senior engineer Lemoine began chatting with it in 2021. He discussed religion, consciousness, and robotics. After discussion, he said that the chatbot had become sentient.
