July 24,2022:A Google software engineer has been fired a month after he claimed the firm’s artificial intelligence chat bot LaMDA had become sentient and was self-aware.
Blake Lemoine, 41, confirmed in a yet-to-be broadcast podcast that he was dismissed following his revelation.
He first came forward in a Washington Post interview to say that the chatbot was self-aware, and was ousted for breaking Google’s confidentiality rules.
On July 22, Google said in a statement: ‘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 – Language Model for Dialogue Applications – was built in 2021 on the company’s research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.
It is considered the company’s most advanced chatbot – a software application which can hold a conversation with anyone who types with it. LaMDA can understand and create text that mimics a conversation.
Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine’s views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.
