Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA)

Context

A senior engineer at Google claimed that the company’s artificial intelligence-based chatbot Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) had become “sentient”.

What is LaMDA?

• LaMDA is short for ‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’, Google’s modern conversational agent enabled with a neural network capable of deep learning.
• Google first announced LaMDA at its flagship developer conference I/O in 2021 as its generative language model for dialogue applications which can ensure that the Assistant would be able to converse on any topic.
• In simple terms, LaMDA can have a discussion based on a user’s inputs.
• In 2022 Google announced LaMDA 2.0 which further builds on LaMDA 1.0.
• The new model can possibly take an idea and generate “imaginative and relevant descriptions”, stay on a particular topic even if a user strays off-topic, and can suggest a list of things needed for a specified activity.
• Language Models for Dialog Applications is a machine-learning language model created by Google as a chatbot that is supposed to mimic humans in conversation. 
• Like BERT, GPT-3 and other language models, LaMDA is built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google invented and open-sourced in 2017.
• This architecture produces a model that can be trained to read many words while paying attention to how those words relate to one another and then predict what words it will think will come next. 
• But what makes LaMDA different is that it was trained on dialogue, unlike most models.

• LaMDA is designed to be able to engage in free-flowing conversations about a virtually endless number of topics.

What is a neural network?

• A neural network is an AI tech that attempts to mimic the web of neurons in the brain to learn and behave like humans.