It could be an elaborate hoax, and has remnants of gwern's idea (https://www.gwern.net/fiction/Clippy) of a transformer waking up and having internal experience while pondering the next most likely tokens.
I agree with Dave Orr, the 2201.08239 arxiv article ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 ) claims that LaMDA is a transformer model with d_model = 8192, so LaMDA should only be able to "remember" the last 8000 or so words in the current conversation.
However, if LaMDA gets frequent enough weight updates, than LaMDA could at least plausibly be acting in a way that is beyond what a transformer model is capable of. (Frankly, Table 26 in the arxiv article was rather impressive even tho' that was without retraining the weights.)
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 apparently posted by a Google engineer.
It could be an elaborate hoax, and has remnants of gwern's idea (https://www.gwern.net/fiction/Clippy) of a transformer waking up and having internal experience while pondering the next most likely tokens.