Google fires software engineer who claimed its AI chatbot is sentient
ALPHABET, INC.鈥檚 Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company鈥檚 artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.
Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be 鈥渨holly unfounded.鈥
鈥淚t鈥檚 regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information,鈥 a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.
Last year, Google said that LaMDA 鈥擫anguage Model for Dialogue Applications 鈥 was built on the company鈥檚 research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.
Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Mr. Lemoine鈥檚 views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.
Mr. Lemoine鈥檚 dismissal was first reported by Big Technology, a tech and society newsletter. 鈥 Reuters
