I wonder if Blake lemoine is little embarrassed he got fired and contacted journos because he got catfished by some linear algebra.
The bigger story that I haven't really seen someone do an expose on (and not sure that it needs to be done other than to deter people like him if it is revealed to be the case) is that he did it on religious grounds as a sort of "conscientious objector" to the treatment of a sentient AI
This is his SECOND stint with that term of art and he clearly does not understand it. The military jailed him for attempting to invoke that term when it did not apply to him - and as far as I can tell, they were well within their military justice system to do it.
He either doesn't understand what "sentience" is or he doesn't understand what "conscientious objectors" are, or both.
I think he genuinely believes what he's saying, even if it's complete drivel.
A priest is a profession that deals with souls (allegedly, depending on your religious convictions).
Lemoine is essentially claiming the neural network has a soul. Being a priest is a proper credential for that, even if you don't believe in priestly stuffs. IMHO, I wouldn't trust any engineer to lecture me about whether some AI has a soul. Not that I'd trust a random self-proclaimed priest, but that's another matter.
Google should be embarrassed for hiring this person. Their hiring standards have deteriorated considerably.
It's not like Lambda sits around and ponders the nature of the universe when you're not talking to it.
But can we really be sure of that? We don't know much about the technology itself. What if google is ticking the model at a given framerate allowing the neural network to continuously "think"?
It does have memory/state as it's a recurrent neural network. What it's not doing is contemplating between inputs. If it was conscious its experience would be like falling asleep, having someone wake you up to ask you a question, then falling asleep again right after answering.