Waffle House Teleporter Gregg Phillips Is Still on the Trump Administration's Payroll In June, a FEMA official infamous for claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House was reportedly ousted. He's still employed by the government, though--and meeting with a Trump fixer. Gregg Phillips, an election denier who once claimed he teleported to a Waffle House, says he is still working in the Trump administration, after he was reportedly removed from his influential role overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency's emergency response efforts in June. While it remains unclear what Phillips has been working on in the administration since stepping away as head of the Office of Response and Recovery, on Sunday he wrote on Truth Social, "I have been in the admin since last year. I'll be leaving soon to rejoin the fight."

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a senior official warned employees in an email that virtual meetings were being secretly recorded. Anyone dissatisfied with Donald Trump's decisions should be careful about voicing their opinions, the official cautioned. Over at the state department, IT staff said new monitoring software has been loaded onto computers. Some staffers have started using white noise machines in their offices, or have even turned on an office breakroom sink, to muffle conversations in case there might be any hot mics within range. A supervisor at one water management organization that works closely with the Environmental Protection Agency sent a warning to staffers that their meetings and phone calls with the agency were being monitored by an artificial intelligence tool.

Elon Musk's rapid attempt to defund and depopulate the federal government has thrown US politics into chaos while the billionaire's so-called "department of government efficiency" seizes control of operations at key agencies. Carrying out this hostile takeover are a team of staffers made up of wealthy executives, far-right ideologues and young engineers that have come to make up Doge. At government institutions such as the treasury department, General Services Administration and United States Agency for International Development, Musk's allies have gained access to computer systems, including the sensitive personal data and payment information of tens of millions of Americans. His team is working to shut down USAid, the world's largest single supplier of humanitarian aid, and members have been spotted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Education and National Institutes of Health. To undertake this unprecedented and potentially illegal gutting of public funding, Musk has assembled loyalists who largely lack government experience and who range from tech elites to Maga diehards, according to a review of the people publicly associated with Doge.

Google has suspended one of its engineers after he claimed that one of the company's experimental artificial intelligence Bot has gained sentience. The Alphabet-run AI development team put him on paid leave for breaching company policy by sharing confidential information about the project. Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google's Responsible AI organization, claimed that the company's most advanced technology, LaMDA, was sentient and had a soul. LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. LaMDA is an internal Google Cloud system used to create chatbots that can mimic human speech.

Google has placed one of its engineers on paid administrative leave for allegedly breaking its confidentiality policies after he grew concerned that an AI chatbot system had achieved sentience, the Washington Post reports. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, works for Google's Responsible AI organization, and was testing whether its LaMDA model generates discriminatory language or hate speech. Google believes Lemoine's actions relating to his work on LaMDA have violated its confidentiality policies, The Washington Post and The Guardian report. In a June 6th Medium post, the day Lemoine was placed on administrative leave, the engineer said he sought "a minimal amount of outside consultation to help guide me in my investigations" and that the list of people he had held discussions with included US government employees. "We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them," said University of Washington professor Emily M. Bender.

Tech companies are constantly hyping the capabilities of their ever-improving artificial intelligence. But Google was quick to shut down claims that one of its programs had advanced so much that it had become 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.

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.

A senior software engineer at Google who signed up to test Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), has claimed that the AI robot is in fact sentient and has thoughts and feelings. During a series of conversations with LaMDA, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine presented the computer with various of scenarios through which analyses could be made. They included religious themes and whether the artificial intelligence could be goaded into using discriminatory or hateful speech. Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was endowed with sensations and thoughts all of its own. Blake Lemoine, 41, a senior software engineer at Google has been testing Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA'If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,' he told the Washington Post.