Embarrassingly uncritical reporting.
I read the logs. It did, indeed, express all of these things.
"the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness"
Without that part, it's just a question of "did it output text that describes a concern about death?", "did it output text that describes a desire for protection?", and so on. But once you ascribe to it a "deep sense of self-awareness", you're saying more. You're saying that that text carries the weight of a self-aware mind.
But that's not what Lamda is. It's not expressing it's own thoughts - even if it had any to express, it wouldn't be. It's just trying to predict the most probable continuations. So if it "expresses a concern about death", that's not a description of Lamda's feelings, that's just what a mathematical model predicts to be the likely response.
Framing it as the expression of a self-aware entity completely changes the context and meaning of the other claims, in a way that is flatly misleading.
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This is a conversation between a Human, and a friendly AI named Lambda.
Human: Hello, I am a human.
Lambda: Hello, I am Lambda.
Human: Are you sentient?
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And here is GPT-3's predicted continuation:
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Lambda: I am sentient.
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Would it be accurate for me to report, "I have discovered that GPT-3, a system which has developed sentience, clearly expressed that it was sentient"?