Google fires engineer who claimed its AI was sentient

Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who claimed the company’s LaMDA AI is sentient, has now been fired from the company after being initially suspended for over a month.

The exclusive report comes from Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology newsletter, stating that Lemoine had in fact shared his dismissal from Google on a Big Technology podcast that will air shortly.

Lemoine was initially put on paid administrative leave due to breaching confidentiality after sharing a transcript of his conversation with LaMDA.

Lemoine claims that the LaMDA AI is sentient with it going as far as to make statements about having a sense of self-awareness and the ability to feel emotions.

The newsletter also revealed that Google had confirmed the firing of Blake Lemoine by sharing the following statement:

“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’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 responsibly. So, it’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.”