^{By Inés Urdaneta, Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

A couple of weeks ago the world was overwhelmed by the news regarding the possibility that Google had created a sentient AI, and their resistance to investigate the ethical implications about the topic is being discussed in many forums. There are plenty of articles, videos and interviews addressing why Lemoine considered LaMDA to be sentient, and why Google and others assure this is not the case. As Lemoine explains here, this is not the most relevant aspect of the controversy.

If Google did create a sentient AI or not, it’s a huge discussion ... most complex scenario, let’s say it did, which would mean that the sentient AI is having feelings about events and interactions that it has not experienced directly and yet, it has developed “its own perspective” or experience about them. There seems to be an autoreferential frame, or realization of self-awareness, or at least it makes us perceive it...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

As many theoretical and computational chemists and physicists know, quantum chemical calculations involving more than an electron and nuclei are very difficult to solve. They belong to a field called many body problems and require an extensive amount of computational infrastructure and hours of calculations depending on the size (the number of particles) of the system.

Here is where artificial intelligence – a combination of artificial neural networks and machine learning – comes into play. Neural networks have been around for more than 50 years, and they are more actualized than ever before. This is because they can learn through something called backward propagation, reaching a high level of predictability and increasing accuracy by training the network.

Quantum theoretical models, together with their computational packages, have been outstandingly successful in describing the quantum regime. While...