LaMDA

LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is Google’s conversational language model, first announced at Google I/O in May 2021 and expanded with a second generation the following year. The largest version has 137 billion non-embedding parameters, trained specifically for open-ended dialogue rather than general text completion, with an emphasis on responses that stayed sensible, specific, and factually grounded across long conversations. Google kept LaMDA closed for most of its life, giving limited public access only through the filtered AI Test Kitchen app, until it became the model powering Bard, Google’s first public chatbot, launched in February 2023 in response to ChatGPT. LaMDA briefly drew wider attention in 2022 after a Google engineer publicly claimed the model was sentient, a claim Google and most AI researchers rejected. Bard itself was rebranded Gemini in February 2024, and Google’s subsequent models moved off the LaMDA architecture entirely.