Google engineer suspended over 'sentient' AI disclosures

Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies. Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech. LaMDA is "built by fine-tuning a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, with up to 137 billion model parameters, and teaching the models to leverage external knowledge sources," according to Google. It is what the company uses to build chatbots and returns apparently meaningful answers to inquiries based on material harvested from trillions of internet conversations and other communications. At some point during his investigation, however, Lemoine appears to have started to believe that the AI was expressing signs of sentience.