Has Google AI become sentient?

According to one researcher, the program says it has a soul

Recently, a Google computer scientist was suspended by the technology company after claiming in the media that the company’s artificial intelligence appeared to have gained consciousness. The AI in question isn’t a terrifying robot, but a chatbot. It’s a large, sophisticated language model known as LaMDA, which stands for “Language Models for Dialog Applications.”

The Washington Post first broke the story.

The AI system builds chatbots to mimic speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet, including YouTube, Google Books, Google Maps, message boards, social media and more. This allows it to communicate in written chats in a way that’s almost undetectable from an actual human.