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The article has been authored by Sanur Sharma, an associate fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been considered the key to the future when it comes to imitating the human brain or becoming sentient. Recently, Google’s AI engineer Blake Lemoine going public on Google LaMDA, has sparked a discussion on AI models achieving consciousness. But what is more important here with these sparks is the serious concern regarding AI ethics.
So, what exactly is LaMDA, and why it is called sentient?
LaMDA is Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications. It is a chatbot based on the big advanced language model that can ingest trillions of words from the internet to inform its conversation. It is built on a massive corpus of data or text crawled from the internet. It is a statistical abstraction of all the text. So, when this system or model is asked, it takes the text written in the beginning, tries to continue based on the words related to one another, and predicts what words it thinks will come next. So, it is a suggestive model that continues to the text you put in. LaMDA has similar skills to BERT and GPT-3 language models and is built on Transformer, a Neural Network architecture that google research invented in 2017. The model produced through this architecture has been trained to read words, sentences and paragraphs, relate words with one another, and predict words that would come next in the conversation.
So how is it different from other chatbots also designed for conversations? Chatbots are conversational agents meant for specific applications and follow a narrow predefined path. In contrast, according to Google, “LaMDA is a model for dialogue application capable of engaging in free flow conversations about seemingly endless topics”.
The general characterisation of conversations tends to revolve around specific topics, and due to their open-ended nature, the conversation can end up in a completely different domain. According to Google, LaMDA is trained to pick up these several nuances of language that differentiate open-ended conversations from other forms making them more sensible. The Google 2020 research states that “Transformer based Language Model based on Dialogue could learn to talk about virtually anything”. It further stated that LaMDA could be fine-tuned to improve its sensibleness and specificity of the response
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