About whether Google's LaMDA is sentient and how people judge sentience in others.
Has this happened?
Yes 20 (18%)Not sure 50 (45%)No 40 (36%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether Google's LaMDA is sentient and how people judge sentience in others.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Lambda and these language models are not currently capable maintaining an internal train of thought that isn't expressed as token context. It has no memory of the world other than what we tell it to have. It can only "think" as long as it takes to infer a token.
I think these big language models might get closer to something we would all call sentience once they can refer directly to their weights' previous activations for context instead of just tokens.