Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Friday it had fired a senior software engineer who claimed the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-confident human. Google, which put software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he violated company policy and that it considers his claims against LaMDA to be “completely without merit. “It is regrettable that, despite his long engagement on this issue, Blake still chose to consistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to protect product information,” a Google spokesperson said .
Last year, Google said LaMDA Language Model for Dialogue Applications was built on the company’s research that showed that Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about pretty much anything. Google and many leading scientists quickly dismissed Lemoine’s views as misleading, saying that LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.
