A Google engineer claims LaMDA is sentient
The Washington Post published Nitasha Tiku's article "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life," reporting that Google's Blake Lemoine believed LaMDA was sentient; Lemoine released transcripts of his conversations with it the same day. Google said a team of ethicists and technologists had reviewed his concerns against its AI Principles and told him the evidence did not support the claims. Lemoine was suspended on June 13 over the disclosure of the transcripts and fired on July 22, with Google saying his claims were "wholly unfounded" and that he had violated company policy. Whatever the merits of his belief, the episode brought wide public attention to the phenomenon of people reading a mind into a sufficiently fluent dialogue system — anticipating, six months before ChatGPT, the question of how humans would respond to these systems.