Post #19

Google fired engineer who said its AI was sentient Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google, became known for interviews where he claimed that LaMDA, the company’s new system for building chatbots, had a conscious and a soul. During the conversational exchanges with LaMDA, Lemoine noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood. It was also able to change Lemoine's mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics. As a result, he wanted Google to seek AI consent before running experiments on it. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” Lemoine told to The Washington Post. Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said the company has reviewed LaMDA 11 times. “We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with Lemoine for many months,” he said. Most AI experts believe the industry is still very far from attaining true computer intelligence. For example, Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is a system that recognizes and generates text. It’s powered by Google’s advanced language neural networks which were trained on trillion-word datasets crawled from the Internet. LaMDA imitates conversational exchanges and produces humanlike speech, but it cannot understand language or meaning. Lemoine says that after firing he is considering potentially starting his own AI company focused on collaborative storytelling video games. #AI