Google has finally fired the engineer who insists that one of the company's experimental AI's has gained sentience. In June, news broke that Blake Lemoine had been suspended from Google over his claims about the AI, which is called Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA. Shortly after, Lemoine claimed the AI had retained, and then later lost, a lawyer. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Lemoine had officially been let go. Lemoine's most recent tweet, last week, seems to make light of the situation by pointing to a satirical Onion headline about a Dairy Queen employee getting fired for saying the Blizzard machine was 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. The Verge reports: 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. 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.

If one day you get the impression that an answering robot or some other device and artificial intelligence seems really human, stop for a moment …

If one day you get the impression that an answering robot or some other device and artificial intelligence seems really human, stop for a moment and remember the hard lesson learned by the now ex-employee of Google Blake Lemoine. A software engineer, Lemoine recently made headlines in the world's top media outlets after he swore together that LamDA, a form of artificial intelligence developed by Google, would have become self-aware. Lemoine's conclusion was first published by the American newspaper The Washington Post on June 11th. Nearly a month and a half later, Google fired the software engineer. According to Google, Lemoine violated the company's data security policies.

For Google, it was another in a line of homegrown controversies about the ethics and role of its A.I., an area of technology on which the company has staked its future. Mr. Lemoine's contention that LaMDA is sentient has been criticized by the company and many other A.I. experts who have said these types of chatbots -- software that simulates a text-based conversation with another human, often used for customer service -- are not advanced enough to be conscious. "If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively," Mr. Pappas said. "We found Blake's claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months." Besides taking his concerns to the media, Mr. Lemoine said in June that he handed over documents to a U.S. senator, whom he hasn't identified, claiming that they provided evidence that Google and its technology engaged in religious discrimination.

Google has fired a software engineer who claimed that the search engine giant's artificial intelligence (AI) system – (LaMDA) – short for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications", had become sentient and began reasoning like a human. Blake Lemoine was last month put on administrative leave. "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," wrote Lemoine in a mail he sent to members of his company. Also read: Is Google's LaMDA sentient?

In its statement, Google said it takes the responsible development of AI "very seriously" and published a report detailing this. It added that any employee concerns about the company's technology are reviewed "extensively", and that Lamda has been through 11 reviews.