Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagBlake Lemoine and sentient computers

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Lemoine at COSM 2022: A Conversation on AI and LaMDA

Will AI ever become "sentient"?

Blake Lemoine, ex-Google employee and AI expert, sat down with Discovery Institute’s Jay Richards at the 2022 COSM conference last November. Together they discussed AI, Google, and how and why Lemoine got to where he is today. Lemoine famously claimed last year that LaMDA, Google’s breakthrough AI technology, had achieved sentience. Lemoine explains that many people at Google thought AI had the potential for sentience, but that such technology should not be made prematurely for fear of the negative impacts it could have on society. You can listen to their interesting and brief conversation in the video below, and be sure to see more sessions from the 2022 COSM conference featuring Lemoine and other leaders and innovators in technology on Read More ›

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Artificial intelligence - sentient AI thinking for itself using computational data and a human-like sense of consciousness and conscience. Generative AI

Ex-Googler Blake Lemoine Still Thinks AI is Sentient

Lemoine posits that because AI can appear to act anxious and stressed, it can be assumed to be sentient

Blake Lemoine, who formerly worked for Google, has doubled down on his claim that AI systems like LaMDA and Chat-GPT are “sentient.” Lemoine went public on his thoughts on sentience in The Washington Post last June with his bold claim, and since parting ways with Google, has not backed down on his beliefs. Lemoine posits that because AI can appear to act anxious and stressed, it can be assumed to be sentient. Maggie Harrison writes at Futurism, An interesting theory, but still not wholly convincing, considering that chatbots are designed to emulate human conversation — and thus, human stories. Breaking under stress is a common narrative arc; this particular aspect of machine behavior, while fascinating, seems less indicative of sentience, Read More ›

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Summer meadow blow balls landscape painting

Could AI ever pass the Van Gogh test?

Van Gogh was crazy but he was talented and AI can be neither

The Van Gogh Test for sheer creativity? Thursday night at COSM presented a live, in-person interview with Federico Faggin, the Italian physicist and computer engineer who co-won the prestigious Kyoto prize in 1997 for helping develop the Intel 4004 chip. Faggin was interviewed by technology reporter Maria Teresa Cometto, who asked him to regale the audience with tales about helping to design early microchips. Eventually Faggin recounted a time when he was “studying neuroscience and biology, trying to understand how the brain works,” and came upon a startling realization: And at one point I asked myself, “But wait a second, I mean these books, all this talk about electrical signals, biochemical signals, but when I taste some chocolate, I mean Read More ›