{"id":22923,"date":"2022-07-23T03:39:40","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T03:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fired-blake-lemoine-the-engineer-who-said-lamda-was-sentient\/"},"modified":"2022-07-23T03:39:40","modified_gmt":"2022-07-23T03:39:40","slug":"google-fired-blake-lemoine-the-engineer-who-said-lamda-was-sentient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fired-blake-lemoine-the-engineer-who-said-lamda-was-sentient\/","title":{"rendered":"Google fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who said LaMDA was sentient"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div class=\"wpds-c-grBDNq hide-for-print mb-sm undefined\">\n<div class=\"PJLV PJLV-iAjpuP-css flex items-center pr-sm\" data-qa=\"article-actions\">\n<div class=\"wpds-c-fLphcs\"><button class=\"wpds-c-gNHrZC wpds-c-gNHrZC-bywHgD-variant-primary wpds-c-gNHrZC-biynoz-density-compact wpds-c-gNHrZC-hZSyid-isOutline-true wpds-c-gNHrZC-ejCoEP-icon-left wpds-c-gNHrZC-futxca-cv wpds-c-gNHrZC-ihhnWqF-css\"><button class=\"PJLV PJLV-igcOMTV-css\"><svg xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" viewbox=\"0 0 16 16\" fill=\"currentColor\" aria-hidden=\"true\" focusable=\"false\" role=\"img\" class=\"wpds-c-coakfw wpds-c-efqEZa focus-highlight flex items-center justify-center brad-lg pointer transition-400 ease-in-out transition-colors\" aria-label=\"Comment on this story\" iconstyle=\"[object Object]\"><title>Comment on this story<\/title><path d=\"M14 14V2H2v9.47h8.18L12.43 13ZM3 10.52V3h10v9.23l-2.5-1.66Z\"\/><\/svg><\/button><\/p>\n<p>Comment<\/p>\n<p><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"teaser-content grid-center\">\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who told The Washington Post that the company&#8217;s artificial intelligence was sentient, said the company fired him on Friday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">Lemoine said he received a termination email from the company on Friday along with a request for a video conference.  He asked to have a third party present at the meeting, but he said Google declined.  Lemoine says he is speaking with lawyers about his options.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">Lemoine worked for Google&#8217;s Responsible AI organization and, as part of his job, began talking to LaMDA, the company&#8217;s artificially intelligent system for building chatbots, in the fall.  He came to believe the technology was sentient after signing up to test if the artificial intelligence could use discriminatory or hate speech.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p><span class=\"font--article-body font-copy hide-for-print ma-0 pb-md db italic interstitial\">The Google engineer who thinks the company&#8217;s AI has come to life<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said the company takes AI development seriously and has reviewed LaMDA 11 times, as well as publishing a research paper that detailed efforts for responsible development.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">\u201cIf an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively,\u201d he added.  \u201cWe found Blake&#8217;s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">He attributed the discussions to the company&#8217;s open culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">\u201cIt&#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,\u201d Gabriel added.  \u201cWe will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">Lemoine&#8217;s firing was first reported in the newsletter Big Technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">Lemoine&#8217;s interviews with LaMDA prompted a wide discussion about recent advances in AI, public misunderstanding of how these systems work, and corporate responsibility.  Google previously pushed out heads of Ethical AI division, Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, after they warned about risks associated with this technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p><span class=\"font--article-body font-copy hide-for-print ma-0 pb-md db italic interstitial\">Google hired Timnit Gebru to be an outspoken critic of unethical AI.  Then she was fired for it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">LaMDA utilizes Google&#8217;s most advanced large language models, a type of AI that recognizes and generates text.  These systems cannot understand language or meaning, researchers say.  But they can produce deceptively humanlike speech because they are trained on massive amounts of data crawled from the internet to predict the next most likely word in a sentence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">After LaMDA talked to Lemoine about personhood and its rights, he began to investigate further.  In April, he shared a Google Doc with top executives called \u201cIs LaMDA Sentient?\u201d  that contained some of his conversations with LaMDA, where it claimed to be sentient.  Two Google executives looked into his claims and dismissed them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p><span class=\"font--article-body font-copy hide-for-print ma-0 pb-md db italic interstitial\">Big Tech builds AI with bad data.  So scientists sought better data.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md\">Lemoine was previously put on paid administrative leave in June for violating the company&#8217;s confidentiality policy.  The engineer, who spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms, said he is considering potentially starting his own AI company focused on a collaborative storytelling video games.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<section class=\"b bt bc-offblack dn-ns hide-for-print\" data-testid=\"mostRead\" subscriptions-section=\"content\"\/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Comment on this story Comment Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who told The Washington Post that the company&#8217;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 a third &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fired-blake-lemoine-the-engineer-who-said-lamda-was-sentient\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Google fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who said LaMDA was 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":22861,"url":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-fires-ai-engineer-blake-lemoine-who-claimed-its-lamda-2-ai-is-sentient\/","url_meta":{"origin":22923,"position":0},"title":"Google fires AI engineer Blake Lemoine, who claimed its LaMDA 2 AI is sentient","date":"July 23, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company'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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Technology&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-apps\/imrs.php?src=https:\/\/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/EO3S3VXIOII6ZJBCCG53SHNTBM.jpg&w=1440","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22923"}],"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=22923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}