There’s a great episode with Blake Lemoine on the Duncan Trussel podcast (Duncan created the Midnight Gospel on Netflix) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0NXNvJtRQSuWl4HM1MvhD0?si=V...
Listening to that it seems clear Blake knew he was likely to be fired but in his eyes it’s some kind of a duty to tell the world.
One interesting point he makes in the Podcast is Lamda is not one thing like GPT-3 but a bunch of different systems across Google interacting as one and he argues the interaction of the whole is what makes sentience.
It’s a pretty “far out there” podcast but worth the time IMO