#LaMDA

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. 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. 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. We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months. The AI chatbot in question was the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) system. LaMDA was announced at last year’s Google I/O in the hopes of improving the conversations of AI assistants to be more open-ended and natural-sounding. Lemoine had been testing LaMDA and its ability to conversate. Read more in our articles including "Google fires engineer who claimed its AI was sentient" and "Google Engineer claims its AI is sentient, gets suspended".