Google fires engineer Blake Lemoine who contended its AI technology was sentient
New York (CNN) Google (GOOG) has fired the engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, the company confirmed, saying he violated employment and data security policies.
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer for Google, claimed that a conversation technology called LaMDA had reached a level of consciousness after exchanging thousands of messages with it.
Google confirmed it had first put the engineer on leave in June. The company said it dismissed Lemoine’s “wholly unfounded” claims only after reviewing them extensively. He had reportedly been at Alphabet for seven years. In a statement, Google said it takes the development of AI “very seriously” and that it’s committed to “responsible innovation.”
Google is one of the leaders in innovating AI technology, which included LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” Technology like this responds to written prompts by finding patterns and predicting sequences of words from large swaths of text — and the results can be disturbing for humans.
“What sort of things are you afraid of?” Lemoine asked LaMDA, in a Google Doc shared with Google’s top executives last April, the Washington Post reported
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