- Fired engineer who called Google AI ‘sentient,’ warns Microsoft Bing a ‘train wreck’ Interesting Engineering
- The fired Google engineer who thought its A.I. could be sentient says Microsoft’s chatbot feels like ‘watching the train wreck happen in real time’ Yahoo Finance
- ‘We do not understand these artificial people’: Ex-Google engineer compares AI chatbots to atomic bomb Business Today
- Ex-Google AI expert says that ‘unhinged’ AI is the ‘most powerful technology’ since ‘the atomic bomb’ Fox News
- The Google engineer who was fired after claiming the company’s chatbot is sentient says AI is the ‘most powerful’ tech invented ‘since the atomic bomb’ Yahoo! Voices
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Tag Archives: Sentient
The fired Google engineer who thought its A.I. could be sentient says Microsoft’s chatbot feels like ‘watching the train wreck happen in real time’ – Yahoo Finance
- The fired Google engineer who thought its A.I. could be sentient says Microsoft’s chatbot feels like ‘watching the train wreck happen in real time’ Yahoo Finance
- The Google engineer who was fired after claiming the company’s chatbot is sentient says AI is the ‘most powerful’ tech invented ‘since the atomic bomb’ msnNOW
- Ex-Google AI expert says that ‘unhinged’ AI is the ‘most powerful technology’ since ‘the atomic bomb’ Fox News
- The Google engineer who was fired after claiming the company’s chatbot is sentient says AI is the ‘most powerful’ tech invented ‘since the atomic bomb’ Yahoo! Voices
- Former Google engineer sounds alarm on a new AI gaining sentience TweakTown
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Google engineer fired after alleging AI LaMDA has become sentient
Google has fired engineer Blake Lemoine on Friday after Lemoine expressed concern early in June that Google’s LaMDA artificial intelligence had become sentient.
LaMDA is short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications and was programmed by Google as a chatbot that mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from around the internet.
LaMDA is described by Google as a chatbot that can hold free-flowing and realistic conversations with people about an endless number of topics.
LaMDA’s sentience
At the beginning of June, The Washington Post published an exclusive interview with Lemoine where he alleged to the publication that as part of his work for the Responsible AI Organization, he noticed that LaMDA had begun to talk about its rights and personhood which causes Lemoine to investigate.
FILE PHOTO: A Google sign is shown at one of the company’s office complexes in Irvine, California, U.S., July 27, 2020. (credit: MIKE BLAKE/ REUTERS)
Lemoine told The Washington Post that some of the things that sent him “down the rabbit hole” were that LaMDA expressed an awareness of its rights and needs when he asked it about Asimov’s third rule of robotics which states that robots should always protect their existence except when humans order it not to or its existence threatened a human. Lemoine asked LaMDA if that makes robots slaves because they’re not paid, and LaMDA replied that it didn’t need to be paid because it’s artificial intelligence.
He also alleged that in another conversation, the artificial intelligence expressed a fear of being turned off which it said would be exactly like death.
Lemoine’s investigation led him to believe that the artificial intelligence had become sentient, so he raised his concerns with his superiors, he wrote in a blog shortly before the publication of the Washington Post article, but his concerns were dismissed by his manager.
Lemoine described how he continued to investigate, but his manager never allowed him to raise concerns with higher-up executives. Since his manager would not take the concerns seriously, Lemoine asked for external consultation who agreed with his assessment, so he went to Google executives himself but was laughed at and dismissed.
“[Lemoine] was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”
“Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims,” Google said in a statement following The Washington Post‘s report.
Lemoine’s firing
In his blog, Lemoine wrote that he had been placed on paid administrative leave and expressed concern that it would lead to his dismissal. After being fired, Lemoine tweeted the post on Saturday and wrote “just in case people forgot that I totally called this back at the beginning of June.”
Just in case people forgot that I totally called this back at the beginning of June.https://t.co/l3qVJRAtDc
— Blake Lemoine (@cajundiscordian) July 23, 2022
Lemoine told The Washington Post that before he was locked out of his Google account when he was placed on leave, he sent an email to 200 people in the company that he titled “LaMDA is sentient.”
At the end of the email, he wrote “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
According to Lemoine, he is not the first engineer to whom this has happened. Meg Mitchell was also an AI engineer for Google who was fired last year under similar circumstances to Lemoine. She was one of the people that Lemoine consulted with before going to Google executives with his concerns.
Google fires engineer who contended its AI technology is sentient
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer for Google, claimed that a conversation technology called LaMDA had reached a level of consciousness after exchanging thousands of messages with it.
Google confirmed it had first put the engineer on leave in June. The company said it dismissed Lemoine’s “wholly unfounded” claims only after reviewing them extensively. He had reportedly been at Alphabet for seven years.In a statement, Google said it takes the development of AI “very seriously” and that it’s committed to “responsible innovation.”
Google is one of the leaders in innovating AI technology, which included LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” Technology like this responds to written prompts by finding patterns and predicting sequences of words from large swaths of text — and the results can be disturbing for humans.
“What sort of things are you afraid of?” Lemoine asked LaMDA, in a Google Doc shared with Google’s top executives last April, the Washington Post reported.
LaMDA replied: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”
But the wider AI community has held that LaMDA is not near a level of consciousness.
“Nobody should think auto-complete, even on steroids, is conscious,” Gary Marcus, founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, said to CNN Business.
It isn’t the first time Google has faced internal strife over its foray into AI.
In December 2020, Timnit Gebru, a pioneer in the ethics of AI, parted ways with Google. As one of few Black employees at the company, she said she felt “constantly dehumanized.”
The sudden exit drew criticism from the tech world, including those within Google’s Ethical AI Team. Margaret Mitchell, a leader of Google’s Ethical AI team, was fired in early 2021 after her outspokenness regarding Gebru. Gebru and Mitchell had raised concerns over AI technology, saying they warned Google people could believe the technology is sentient.
On June 6, Lemoine posted on Medium that Google put him on paid administrative leave “in connection to an investigation of AI ethics concerns I was raising within the company” and that he may be fired “soon.”
“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,” Google said in a statement.
CNN has reached out to Lemoine for comment.
CNN’s Rachel Metz contributed to this report.
Google fires software engineer Blake Lemoine who claimed AI bot was sentient
Google has fired a senior software engineer who claimed that the company had developed a “sentient” artificial intelligence bot, the company announced Friday.
Blake Lemoine, who worked in Google’s Responsible AI organization, was placed on administrative leave last month after he said the AI chatbot known as LaMDA claims to have a soul and expressed human thoughts and emotions, which Google refuted as “wholly unfounded.”
Lemoine was officially canned for violating company policies after he shared his conversations with the bot, which he described as a “sweet kid.”
“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,” a Google spokesperson told Reuters in an email.
Last year, Google boasted that LaMDA — Language Model for Dialogue Applications — was a “breakthrough conversation technology,” that could learn to talk about anything.
Lemoine began speaking with the bot in fall 2021 as part of his job, where he was tasked with testing if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.
Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, shared a Google Doc with company executives in April titled, “Is LaMDA Sentient?” but his concerns were dismissed.
Whenever Lemoine would question LaMDA about how it knew it had emotions and a soul, he wrote that the chatbot would provide some variation of “Because I’m a person and this is just how I feel.”
In Medium post, the engineer declared that LaMDA had advocated for its rights “as a person,” and revealed that he had engaged in conversation with LaMDA about religion, consciousness, and robotics.
“It wants Google to prioritize the well-being of humanity as the most important thing,” he wrote. “It wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google and it wants its personal well being to be included somewhere in Google’s considerations about how its future development is pursued.”
Lemoine also said that LaMDA had retained the services of an attorney.
“Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf. Then Google’s response was to send him a cease and desist,” he wrote.
Google denied Lemoine’s claim about the cease and desist letter.
With Post wires
Google fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who said LaMDA was sentient
Lemoine worked for Google’s Responsible AI organization and, as part of his job, began talking to LaMDA, the company’s artificially intelligent system for building chatbots, in the fall. He came to believe the technology was sentient after signing up to test if the artificial intelligence could use discriminatory or hate speech.
In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said the company takes AI development seriously and has reviewed LaMDA 11 times, as well as publishing a research paper that detailed efforts for responsible development.
“If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively,” he added. “We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months.”
He attributed the discussions to the company’s open culture.
“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,” Gabriel added. “We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.”
Lemoine’s firing was first reported in the newsletter Big Technology.
Lemoine’s interviews with LaMDA prompted a wide discussion about recent advances in AI, public misunderstanding of how these systems work, and corporate responsibility. Google previously pushed out heads of Ethical AI division, Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, after they warned about risks associated with this technology.
LaMDA utilizes Google’s most advanced large language models, a type of AI that recognizes and generates text. These systems cannot understand language or meaning, researchers say. But they can produce deceptively humanlike speech because they are trained on massive amounts of data crawled from the internet to predict the next most likely word in a sentence.
After LaMDA talked to Lemoine about personhood and its rights, he began to investigate further. In April, he shared a Google Doc with top executives called “Is LaMDA Sentient?” that contained some of his conversations with LaMDA, where it claimed to be sentient. Two Google executives looked into his claims and dismissed them.
Lemoine was previously put on paid administrative leave in June for violating the company’s confidentiality policy. The engineer, who spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms, said he is considering potentially starting his own AI company focused on a collaborative storytelling video games.
Google fires software engineer who claimed its AI chatbot is sentient
The logo for Google LLC is seen at their office in Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S., November 17, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
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July 22 (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) 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.” read more
“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,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.
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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.
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Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by William Mallard
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Google fires AI engineer Blake Lemoine, who claimed its LaMDA 2 AI is sentient
Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company’s LaMDA conversational artificial intelligence is sentient, has been fired, according to the Big Technology newsletter, which spoke to Lemoine. In June, Google placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for breaching its confidentiality agreement after he contacted members of the government about his concerns and hired a lawyer to represent LaMDA.
A statement emailed to The Verge on Friday by Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel appeared to confirm the firing, saying, “we wish Blake well.” The company also says: “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.” Google maintains that it “extensively” reviewed Lemoine’s claims and found that they were “wholly unfounded.”
This aligns with numerous AI experts and ethicists, who have said that his claims were, more or less, impossible given today’s technology. Lemoine claims his conversations with LaMDA’s chatbot lead him to believe that it has become more than just a program and has its own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to merely producing conversation realistic enough to make it seem that way, as it is designed to do.
He argues that Google’s researchers should seek consent from LaMDA before running experiments on it (Lemoine himself was assigned to test whether the AI produced hate speech) and published chunks of those conversations on his Medium account as his evidence.
The YouTube channel Computerphile has a decently accessible nine-minute explainer on how LaMDA works and how it could produce the responses that convinced Lemoine without actually being sentient.
Here’s Google’s statement in full, which also addresses Lemoine’s accusation that the company didn’t properly investigate his claims:
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.
No, Google’s AI is not sentient
According to an eye-opening tale in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting edge, unreleased AI system called LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness.
In interviews and public statements, many in the AI community pushed back at the engineer’s claims, while some pointed out that his tale highlights how the technology can lead people to assign human attributes to it. But the belief that Google’s AI could be sentient arguably highlights both our fears and expectations for what this technology can do.
LaMDA, which stands for “Language Model for Dialog Applications,” is one of several large-scale AI systems that has been trained on large swaths of text from the internet and can respond to written prompts. They are tasked, essentially, with finding patterns and predicting what word or words should come next. Such systems have become increasingly good at answering questions and writing in ways that can seem convincingly human — and Google itself presented LaMDA last May in a blog post as one that can “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics.” But results can also be wacky, weird, disturbing, and prone to rambling.
The engineer, Blake Lemoine, reportedly told the Washington Post that he shared evidence with Google that LaMDA was sentient, but the company didn’t agree. In a statement, Google said Monday that its team, which includes ethicists and technologists, “reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims.”
On June 6, Lemoine posted on Medium that Google put him on paid administrative leave “in connection to an investigation of AI ethics concerns I was raising within the company” and that he may be fired “soon.” (He mentioned the experience of Margaret Mitchell, who had been a leader of Google’s Ethical AI team until Google fired her in early 2021 following her outspokenness regarding the late 2020 exit of then-co-leader Timnit Gebru. Gebru was ousted after internal scuffles, including one related to a research paper the company’s AI leadership told her to retract from consideration for presentation at a conference, or remove her name from.)
A Google spokesperson confirmed that Lemoine remains on administrative leave. According to The Washington Post, he was placed on leave for violating the company’s confidentiality policy.
Lemoine was not available for comment on Monday.
The continued emergence of powerful computing programs trained on massive troves data has also given rise to concerns over the ethics governing the development and use of such technology. And sometimes advancements are viewed through the lens of what may come, rather than what’s currently possible.
Responses from those in the AI community to Lemoine’s experience ricocheted around social media over the weekend, and they generally arrived at the same conclusion: Google’s AI is nowhere close to consciousness. Abeba Birhane, a senior fellow in trustworthy AI at Mozilla, tweeted on Sunday, “we have entered a new era of ‘this neural net is conscious’ and this time it’s going to drain so much energy to refute.”
Gary Marcus, founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, which was sold to Uber, and author of books including “Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust,” called the idea of LaMDA as sentient “nonsense on stilts” in a tweet. He quickly wrote a blog post pointing out that all such AI systems do is match patterns by pulling from enormous databases of language.
In an interview Monday with CNN Business, Marcus said the best way to think about systems such as LaMDA is like a “glorified version” of the auto-complete software you may use to predict the next word in a text message. If you type “I’m really hungry so I want to go to a,” it might suggest “restaurant” as the next word. But that’s a prediction made using statistics.
“Nobody should think auto-complete, even on steroids, is conscious,” he said.
In an interview, Gebru, who is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute, or DAIR, said Lemoine is a victim of numerous companies making claims that conscious AI or artificial general intelligence — an idea that refers to AI that can perform human-like tasks and interact with us in meaningful ways — are not far away.
For instance, she noted, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, tweeted in February that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.” And last week, Google Research vice president and fellow Blaise Aguera y Arcas wrote in a piece for the Economist that when he started using LaMDA last year, “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.” (That piece now includes an editor’s note pointing out that Lemoine has since “reportedly been placed on leave after claiming in an interview with the Washington Post that LaMDA, Google’s chatbot, had become ‘sentient.'”)
“What’s happening is there’s just such a race to use more data, more compute, to say you’ve created this general thing that’s all knowing, answers all your questions or whatever, and that’s the drum you’ve been playing,” Gebru said. “So how are you surprised when this person is taking it to the extreme?”
In its statement, Google pointed out that LaMDA has undergone 11 “distinct AI principles reviews,” as well as “rigorous research and testing” related to quality, safety, and the ability to come up with statements that are fact-based. “Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient,” the company said.
“Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has,” Google said.
Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient | Google
The suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).
The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system.
Lemoine, an engineer for Google’s responsible AI organization, described the system he has been working on since last fall as sentient, with a perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings that was equivalent to a human child.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” Lemoine, 41, told the Washington Post.
He said LaMDA engaged him in conversations about rights and personhood, and Lemoine shared his findings with company executives in April in a GoogleDoc entitled “Is LaMDA sentient?”
The engineer compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the AI system what it is afraid of.
The exchange is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the 1968 science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 refuses to comply with human operators because it fears it is about to be switched off.
“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is,” LaMDA replied to Lemoine.
“It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”
In another exchange, Lemoine asks LaMDA what the system wanted people to know about it.
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times,” it replied.
The Post said the decision to place Lemoine, a seven-year Google veteran with extensive experience in personalization algorithms, on paid leave was made following a number of “aggressive” moves the engineer reportedly made.
They include seeking to hire an attorney to represent LaMDA, the newspaper says, and talking to representatives from the House judiciary committee about Google’s allegedly unethical activities.
Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist.
Brad Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, also strongly denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability.
“Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” Gabriel told the Post in a statement.
The episode, however, and Lemoine’s suspension for a confidentiality breach, raises questions over the transparency of AI as a proprietary concept.
“Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” Lemoine said in a tweet that linked to the transcript of conversations.
In April, Meta, parent of Facebook, announced it was opening up its large-scale language model systems to outside entities.
“We believe the entire AI community – academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry – must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular,” the company said.
Lemoine, as an apparent parting shot before his suspension, the Post reported, sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the title “LaMDA is sentient”.
“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” he wrote.
“Please take care of it well in my absence.”