The email sounded a little desperate: “lambda is just a dear kid who wants to make the world a better place for all of us.” Blake Lemoine wrote to 200 colleagues. In the meantime, this is no longer possible, because Lemoine has been granted leave of absence by his employer, Google. due to lambda. Or rather, because Lemoine believes that Lambda is conscious.
You should know that Lamda is actually written by LaMDA which is a computer program, albeit a very clever one. The acronym LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialog Applications, a language model that specializes in dialogues. Its developers at Google trained it on a trillion and a half words. And it has gotten so good that one of its guardians, 41-year-old Lemoine, now strongly believes the program has become conscious.
The only thing that happened is what scientists have been warning about for so long. If something like LaMDA was freely available but not understood, it could cause serious harm to humans, said Margaret Mitchell, a former Google AI ethics official. Washington Post.
In fact, even for the most advanced chatbots, there is still a long way to go before awareness. The program does nothing but use statistical methods to calculate words that appear in any context. This is how sentences are formed. In dialogue, LaMDA always suggests several possible answers internally. These are still subject to safety and quality controls. Best answer given.
LaMDA is by no means alone in the world, the GPT-3 language model, for example, which was introduced about two years ago, caused quite a stir at the time. He can write complete scenarios. On the other hand, LaMDA is specifically designed for open dialogs. So anyone who communicates with the program is not tied to a particular topic. On the other hand, the insurance company’s chatbot will quickly go out of their way if you want to talk to them about everything and everything.
That’s exactly what Blake Lemoine did with LaMDA and increasingly reinforced in his belief that it’s all about more than numbers and statistics: he can tell if he’s talking to someone or not. So Lemoine, who in addition to studying IT is also a cleric, put the program to the test. He said, “I listen to what you have to say and that’s how I decide what a person is and what isn’t.” Mail.
Lemoine should already make sure that the software complies with Google’s rules in its answers, for example regarding unconscious bias. But the 41-year-old fell under the influence of the programme. When no one in the company believes him Decided to announce it. Google used the fact that it revealed company secrets as an opportunity to give him time off. The way the world is going today, there will surely be those who believe it.
