I very much doubt that, and it is perhaps the key to our disagreement. If I believed LaMDA were Turing Complete, I would be more likely to think that there is even a small chance of it being sentient in some sense.
> - "with desires" - LaMDA can be thought of as rational agent whose objective function is to produce text with high likelihood
> - "that it expresses in language" it expresses likelihood of next token in language
I don't agree with both statements at the same time.
I can agree that we can say that LaMDA is a rational agent whose goal is to generate the most likely next token (or safe, full human-like reply if we look at the entire system).
But then, we can't say that it uses language to achieve this goal. An example of it using language to achieve this goal would be if, prompted with "What is your name?" it's output would be "Please help me answer this - what would a human think is a likely, safe answer to this question?". Instead, it will generate a sentence that it deems likely.
If we are modeling LaMDA as an agent whose perceptions are text prompts and whose possible outputs are text answers, than it giving a text answer that matches the prompt is more similar to an animal running away or howling in pain than to a human communicating. If the agent were sentient, we would expect to see higher-order behaviors, such as discussing the prompts instead of answering them, asking questions; or, at least generating answers as it is programmed but in a way where it tries to achieve more, similar to how an animal may act normally to get close to you, than snatch your sandwich from your hand (indicating that it had a plan and was displaying normal behaviors with a higher-plan behind them).