What makes everyone in this thread so confident that it isn't sentient?
As said elsewhere, the model doesn't have memory, it doesn't learn, and doesn't have goals. If you were allowed to play with it, you could quickly observe this for yourself with a bit of adversarial play - ask it about the time it fought Genghis Khan, ask it if it wants you to give it a glass of water, etc - you will quickly realize the illusion behind the system. Tell it whatever facts you want, be amazed how well it might recall them, and then start a new conversation and notice that it has entirely forgotten all of them (again, it has no memory, and it doesn't learn anything).
From first principles, we know how the LM works: it has been trained to predict what is the most likely next token in a series of tokens. It has been trained to do this on a gigantic corpus, and is now pretty good at it. You then present it with a prompt, and it starts predicting the most likely token that comes after that prompt, and it keeps predicting for a while until the most likely "token" is to stop. Note that these tokens aren't even words - they are typically letters, or short combinations of letters. To give the illusion of a coherent conversation and memory, the prediction function is applied to the entire conversation so far, not just to the latest prompt.
There is more sophistication to avoid various undesirable behaviors, especially in LaMDA (e.g. the model is also trained to evaluate the "safety" of various possible answers, so it doesn't generate a sentence that insults you or discriminates against you or induces you to do something dangerous etc), but this is the gist of how it works.
To be very clear, this came after many years of milder forms of dementia, where their sentience could not in any way have been in question, even when forgetting who I was or where they were or other such things. But the disease can progress to a stage where it's not clear what, if anything, they understand of the world or themselves anymore.
I can't speak for anterograde amnesia as I have no experience with that disease.
If you search Google for the phrase <you see with your brain not your eyes>, you will find lots of blog posts and the like, explaining with examples which I mean by the 3D VR-like world in your head which I am describing.
Another commenter in this thread raised the question of whether robots that navigate the world are sentient. I think the answer is possibly yes but I'm going to give a huge disclaimer which is I don't think that sentience is morally relevant, I think what is morally relevant is whether an entity feels qualia or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia In my personal view (just hunches really), I think that whether qualia are felt depends on the implementation. My hunch is that an implementation of a neural network in hardware, i.e. an actual network of transistors, might feel qualia, but that a software implementation of the same neural network would not. But others have different hunches and this is a question as yet unsolved by today's science.
The only correct conclusion is "I don't understand myself, so I cannot say anything about how similar something is to me". That's unpleasant and I suspect for a lot of engineers deeply offensive, but it's important to understand where your limitations currently lie.