Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who claimed recently the tech giant’s language technology is sentient and should therefore have its ‘wants’ respected, has been fired.
Google said Lemoine’s claims about The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) were ‘wholly unfounded’ and that the company had worked with him for ‘many months’ to clarify this, the BBC reports.
The company added: ‘So, it’s 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.’
LaMDA is a breakthrough technology that Google says can engage in free-flowing conversations. It is the company’s tool for building chatbots.
Lemoine started making headlines last month when he said LaMDA was showing human-like consciousness. It sparked discussion among AI experts and enthusiasts about the advancement of technology that is designed to impersonate humans.
According to the BBC, he found LaMDA showed self-awareness and could hold conversations about religion, emotions and fears. This led Lemoine to believe that behind its impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.
Lemoine then published a conversation he and another person had with LaMDA, to support his claims.
However, his findings were dismissed by Google and he was placed on paid leave for violating the company’s confidentiality policy.
The Washington Post reports that LaMDA ‘utilizes Google’s most advanced large language models, a type of AI that recognizes and generates text. These systems cannot understand language or meaning, researchers say. But they can produce deceptively humanlike speech because they are trained on massive amounts of data trawled from the internet to predict the next most likely word in a sentence.’
The newspaper reports that ‘after LaMDA talked to Lemoine about personhood and its rights, he began to investigate further. In April, he shared a Google Doc with top executives called “Is LaMDA Sentient?” that contained some of his conversations with LaMDA, where it claimed to be sentient. Two Google executives looked into his claims and dismissed them.’
[Image: https://pixabay.com/vectors/brain-ai-artificial-intelligence-4863428/]