{"id":22861,"date":"2022-07-23T02:22:40","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T02:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fires-ai-engineer-blake-lemoine-who-claimed-its-lamda-2-ai-is-sentient\/"},"modified":"2022-07-23T02:22:40","modified_gmt":"2022-07-23T02:22:40","slug":"google-fires-ai-engineer-blake-lemoine-who-claimed-its-lamda-2-ai-is-sentient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fires-ai-engineer-blake-lemoine-who-claimed-its-lamda-2-ai-is-sentient\/","title":{"rendered":"Google fires AI engineer Blake Lemoine, who claimed its LaMDA 2 AI is sentient"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p id=\"FWvP3T\">Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company&#8217;s LaMDA conversational artificial intelligence is sentient, has been fired, according to the Big Technology newsletter, which spoke to Lemoine.  In June, Google placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for breaching its confidentiality agreement after he contacted members of the government about his concerns and hired a lawyer to represent LaMDA.<\/p>\n<p id=\"JBwnUb\">A statement emailed to <em>The Verge <\/em>on Friday by Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel appeared to confirm the firing, saying, \u201cwe wish Blake well.\u201d  The company also says: \u201cLaMDA has been through 11 distinct reviews, and we published a research paper earlier this year detailing the work that goes into its responsible development.\u201d  Google maintains that it \u201cextensively\u201d reviewed Lemoine&#8217;s claims and found that they were \u201cwholly unfounded.\u201d<\/p>\n<p id=\"LkcOm8\">This aligns with numerous AI experts and ethicists, who have said that his claims were, more or less, impossible given today&#8217;s technology.  Lemoine claims his conversations with LaMDA&#8217;s chatbot lead him to believe that it has become more than just a program and has its own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to merely producing conversation realistic enough to make it seem that way, as it is designed to do. <\/p>\n<p id=\"R4PWcD\">He argues that Google&#8217;s researchers should seek consent from LaMDA before running experiments on it (Lemoine himself was assigned to test whether the AI \u200b\u200bproduced hate speech) and published chunks of those conversations on his Medium account as his evidence.<\/p>\n<aside id=\"0Wblzz\">\n<\/aside>\n<p id=\"3znoi0\">The YouTube channel Computerphile has a decently accessible nine-minute explainer on how LaMDA works and how it could produce the responses that convinced Lemoine without actually being sentient.<\/p>\n<p id=\"NFpGH2\">Here&#8217;s Google&#8217;s statement in full, which also addresses Lemoine&#8217;s accusation that the company didn&#8217;t properly investigate his claims:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p id=\"QLheFq\">As we share in our AI Principles, we take the development of AI very seriously and remain committed to responsible innovation.  LaMDA has been through 11 distinct reviews, and we published a research paper earlier this year detailing the work that goes into its responsible development.  If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively.  We found Blake&#8217;s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months.  These discussions were part of the open culture that helps us innovate responsive.  So, it&#8217;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.  We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company&#8217;s LaMDA conversational artificial intelligence is sentient, has been fired, according to the Big Technology newsletter, which spoke to Lemoine. In June, Google placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for breaching its confidentiality agreement after he contacted members of the government about his concerns and &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fires-ai-engineer-blake-lemoine-who-claimed-its-lamda-2-ai-is-sentient\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Google fires AI engineer Blake Lemoine, who claimed its LaMDA 2 AI is sentient<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":22923,"url":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fired-blake-lemoine-the-engineer-who-said-lamda-was-sentient\/","url_meta":{"origin":22861,"position":0},"title":"Google fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who said LaMDA was sentient","date":"July 23, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment on this storyCommentBlake Lemoine, the Google engineer who told The Washington Post that the company's artificial intelligence was sentient, said the company fired him on Friday.Lemoine said he received a termination email from the company on Friday along with a request for a video conference. He asked to have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Technology&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/thumbor\/BLAD8BQU4bvCfUrKfizzP7q4zCE=\/0x146:2040x1214\/fit-in\/1200x630\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/10802091\/acastro_180508_1777_google_IO_0003.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22861"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}