The Google engineer who made headlines when he claimed that the company's artificial intelligence (AI) bot has consciousness has been fired.
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Blake Lemoine announced his firing on the Big Technology podcast shortly after the notice from Google.
Lemoine was a senior software engineer at the company and worked with a partner in testing the limits of the AI chatbot LaMDA.
In June, he was placed on paid administrative leave by Google after violating confidentiality policy by sharing his conversations with LaMDA online.
Before he was fired, Lemoine sent his findings in an email to 200 people and titled it “LaMDA is sentient.” Google violently pushed back against Lemoine’s claims and ultimately fired him last Friday.
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LaMDA is a language model that is trained on conversational language instead of text.
The advanced AI system uses information about a specific topic to "enrich" the conversation in a natural way.
In an interview, Lemoine described artificial intelligence as a "child" and a "person.".
"They told him there was no evidence that LaMDA was sensitive," said Brian Gabriel, a Google spokesman.
After he made his suspicions public, Lemoine's character and credibility came under close scrutiny by the media and the Google team.
A scathing tweet posted by Lemoine read, "My opinions on the personality and feel of LaMDA are based on my religious beliefs ."
A Google employee wrote on the anonymous message board Blind of Lemoine: “The guy who leaked this is a class A idiot. He’s been on the verge of getting fired multiple times for his non-work related antics, which are distracting and a huge waste of time.”
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“We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is conscious to be completely unfounded and we worked to clarify with him for many months,” Google told Big Technology in response to Lemoine’s firing.
After his firing, Lemoine told the Wall Street Journal that he has contacted lawyers "to see what his next steps will be.".
Google spent more than $31 billion on artificial intelligence research and development last year .
Source of information: thesun.co.uk
