Alphabet's Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.
Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on
leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his
claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded."
Last year, Google said that LaMDA — Language Model for
Dialogue Applications — was built on the company's research showing
Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about
essentially anything.
Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss
Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm
designed to generate convincing human language.
Lemoine's dismissal was first reported by Big Technology, a
tech and society newsletter.