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Google fires engineer who claimed LaMDA AI chatbot was sentient
- Blake Lemoine believed the bot, trained to generate human-like speech, had a mind of its own
- Google said Lemoine’s claims about LaMDA were ‘wholly unfounded’ and that he violated company guidelines, which led to his termination
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The engineer who claimed a chatbot gained sentience was fired from Google on Friday, both he and the tech giant confirmed.
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Blake Lemoine sparked controversy after publishing a paper about his conversations with the Google artificial intelligence chatbot LaMDA, which led him to believe the bot had a mind of its own.
LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is an AI chatbot trained to generate human-like speech.
Google suspended Lemoine in June after it said he violated the company’s employee confidentiality policy, Lemoine told The New York Times.
Experts told Insider the chatbot is most likely not sentient, but Lemoine continued to believe it was. Claiming the chatbot asked him to get a lawyer for itself, he compared it to a human child and a “very intelligent person.”
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