Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., announced on Friday that it had fired a senior software developer who had asserted that LaMDA, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, had a sense of self.
Blake Lemoine, a software developer, was put on leave by Google last month after it said he had broken company rules and that his accusations on LaMDA were “wholly false.”
A Google representative wrote in an email to sources, “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,”
Google said last year that LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, was based on their research proving that Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could pick up pretty much any language.
Lemoine’s ideas were swiftly dismissed as foolish by Google and many other top scientists, who claimed that LaMDA is just a sophisticated computer made to produce believable human language.
Big Technology, a newsletter covering technology and society, broke the news of Lemoine’s firing first.
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