Google researcher fired for believing LaMDA is 'sentient'
Google engineer Blake Lemoine tried to convince fellow Google employees that the company's LaMDA language model was sentient . Per a June 2022 Washington Post report , Lemoine, an ordained Christian mystical priest 'was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt 'When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that . ' Google, technology professionals, philsophers and ethicists responded to the notion that LaMDA - and other technologies - can be human primarily on technical, scientific grounds, prompting Lemoine to complain the model faces 'bigotry' in an interview with WIRED . Google suspended and fired Lemoine after he breached company policy by sharing information about his project, recruited a lawyer for the AI after claiming that LaMDA had asked him to do so, and alleged that Google was discriminating against him because of his religion. System 🤖 LaMDA Operator: Blake Lemoine Developer: Alphabet/Google Country: USA Sector: Technology; Religion Purpose: Optimise language models for dialogue Technology: Large language model; Neural network; NLP/text analysis Issue: Anthropomorphism
- Date it happened
- 2022-06-01
- Organisation involved
- Blake Lemoine
- Product, system or model
- LaMDA
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