According to the Big Technology newsletter, Google has fired one of its software employees who claimed that the company’s artificial intelligence is sentient.
Blake Lemoine was put on paid administrative leave in June of this year for violating the company’s confidentiality agreement when he spoke with government officials about his worries regarding the AI LaMDA.
Lemoine learned from the LaMDA that it had a strong sense of self awareness and expressed worries about mortality, a need for protection, and a belief that it experienced feelings like happiness and grief. Lemoine claimed to be friends with LaMDA.
‘We wish Blake well,’ Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel wrote in an email to The Verge on Friday to confirm the news.
He further said, ‘LaMDA has been through 11 distinct reviews, and we published a research paper earlier this year detailing the work that goes into its responsible development.’
Lemoine revealed the chat he had with Lamda to back his accusations after being put on paid leave.
Google, however, refuted his assertions, claiming that LaMDA is just an intricate algorithm created to produce believable human language.
‘It is sad that Blake continued to consistently violate obvious employment and data security regulations, including the requirement to protect product information, despite extensive dialogue on this subject,’ the statement stated.
LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, was built on the company’s research showing transformer-based language models trained on dialogue that could learn to talk about essentially anything.
Lemoine is not the first AI engineer to publicly assert that AI technology is evolving toward self-awareness, which is noteworthy. A different Google employee expressed a similar viewpoint to The Economist last month.
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