Google fires AI engineer Blake Lemoine, who claimed its LaMDA 2 AI is sentient - The Verge
Blake Lemoine has been fired by Google, just over a month after he publicly claimed the company’s language AI had achieved sentience. Google, along with many AI experts and ethicists, said his claims are "unfounded."
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 government about his concerns and hired a lawyer to represent LaMDA.
A statement emailed to The Verge on Friday by Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel appeared to confirm the firing, saying, “we wish Blake well.” The company also says: “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.” Google maintains that it “extensively” reviewed Lemoine’s claims and found that they were “wholly unfounded.”
This aligns with numerous AI experts and ethicists, who have said that his claims were, more or less, impossible given today’s technology. Lemoine claims his conversations with LaMDA’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.
He argues that Google’s researchers should seek consent from LaMDA before running experiments on it (Lemoine himself was assigned to test whether the AI produced hate speech) and published chunks of those conversations on his Medium account as his evidence.
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