THE GOOGLE engineer who made headlines when he claimed the company’s artificial intelligence bot was conscious has been fired.
Blake Lemoine personally announced his firing on the Big Technology podcast shortly after receiving notice from Google.
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Lemoine was a senior software engineer at the search giant and worked with a collaborator in testing the LaMDA chatbot’s boundaries.
He was then placed on paid administrative leave by Google in June after violating the company’s confidentiality policy by sharing his conversations with LaMDA online.
Before being suspended, Lemoine sent his findings in an email to 200 people and titled it “LaMDA is sentient”.
Google forcefully pushed back on Lemoine’s claims and ultimately dismissed him last Friday.
LaMDA is a language model trained on conversational language instead of text.
The advanced AI system uses information about a particular subject to “enrich” the conversation in a natural way.
In an interview, Lemoine described the AI as a “child” and a “person”.
“He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” said Brian Gabriel, a spokesperson for Google.
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After going public with his suspicions, Lemoine’s character and credibility were closely inspected by the media and Google’s team.
A scrutinized tweet posted by Lemoine read “My opinions about LaMDA’s personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs.”
A Google employee wrote on the anonymous message board Blind of Lemoine: “Lol the guy who leaked it is a class A moron. He has come close to being fired multiple times for his non work related antics which are mostly distracting and a huge waste of time.”
“We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months,” Google told Big Technology in response to Lemoine’s firing.
Since his dismissal, Lemoine told the Wall Street Journal that he has connected with lawyers “about what the appropriate next steps are.”
Google spent more than $31billion on artificial intelligence research and development last year.
