‘Aware’ AI chatbot claim gets Google engineer the sack
Company says software worker’s claim on LaMDA is ‘wholly unfounded’
24 July 2022 - 20:11
byAgency Staff
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Alphabet’s Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person. Google, who put software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA “wholly unfounded”.
“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,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.
In 2021 Google said that LaMDA — Language Model for Dialogue Applications — was built on the company’s research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.
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.
Lemoine’s dismissal was first reported by Big Technology, a tech and society newsletter.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
‘Aware’ AI chatbot claim gets Google engineer the sack
Company says software worker’s claim on LaMDA is ‘wholly unfounded’
Alphabet’s Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person. Google, who put software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA “wholly unfounded”.
“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,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.
In 2021 Google said that LaMDA — Language Model for Dialogue Applications — was built on the company’s research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.
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.
Lemoine’s dismissal was first reported by Big Technology, a tech and society newsletter.
Reuters
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