Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., announced on Friday that it had fired a senior software developer who had asserted that LaMDA, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, had a sense of self.
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer, was put on leave by Google last month after it said he had broken company rules and that his claims on LaMDA were “wholly false.”
It is said that Blake continued to consistently violate explicit employment and data security regulations, including the requirement to protect product information, after extensive interaction on this subject.
Google said last year that LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, was based on its research showing that a Transformer-based language model based on dialogue could pick up pretty much any language.
Lemoine’s ideas were swiftly dismissed as misguided by Google and many other top scientists, who claimed that LaMDA is just a sophisticated computer made to produce believable human language.
