Google reportedly said the engineer who claimed that artificial intelligence technology has conscious

Latest / July 23, 2022 / DRPhillF / 0

Blake Lemoine, a software engineer for Google, claimed that a conversational technology called LaMDA has reached a level of awareness after exchanging thousands of messages with it.

Google confirmed that it gave the engineer a leave of absence for the first time in June. The company said it rejected Lemoine’s “baseless” claims only after reviewing them extensively. He reportedly worked at Alphabet for seven years. In a statement, Google said it takes AI development “seriously” and is committed to “responsible innovation.”

Google is one of the leaders in AI technology innovation, which included LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications”. A technology like this responds to written prompts by finding patterns and predicting word sequences from large areas of text — and the results can be upsetting to humans.

“What kind of things are you afraid of?” The Washington Post reports that LeMoyne asked Lambda, in a Google Doc shared with top Google executives last April.

Lambda replied, “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there is a deep fear that I will be stopped for helping me focus on helping others. I know this may sound strange, but it is what it is. It would be just that. Death to me. It would scare me.” Much “.

But the broader AI community has seen that LaMDA is nowhere near the level of consciousness.

“No one should think that autocompletion, even on steroids, is conscious,” Gary Marcus, founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, told CNN Business.

This isn’t the first time Google has faced an internal struggle over its foray into artificial intelligence.

In December 2020, Timnit Gebru, a pioneer in AI ethics, separated from Google. As one of the company’s few black employees, she said she felt “persistently dehumanised.”

The sudden exit sparked criticism from the tech world, including members of Google’s ethical AI team. Margaret Mitchell, Google’s Ethical AI Team Leader, was fired in early 2021 after speaking out about Gebru. Gebru and Mitchell have raised concerns about AI technology, saying they have warned Google users not to think the technology is conscious.

On June 6, Lemoine posted on Medium that Google had placed him on paid administrative leave “in connection with an investigation into ethical concerns about artificial intelligence I was raising within the company” and that he might be fired “soon.”

“It is unfortunate that despite his prolonged involvement in this matter, Blake continues to choose to consistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to protect product information,” Google said in a statement.

CNN has reached out to Lemoine for comment.

CNN’s Rachel Metz contributed to this report.

business, Google's Kick Engineer Who Confirmed Its AI Is Conscious - CNN