Alphabet Inc.'s Google GOOGL.O said on Friday it has fired a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, LaMDA, was a self-aware person.
Google, which fired software engineer Blake Lemoine last month, said he had violated company policies and found his claims about LaMDA "totally baseless."
"It is unfortunate that, despite a long engagement on this issue, Blake has chosen to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. email to Reuters.
Last year, Google said that LaMDA – Language Model for Dialog Applications – was based on the company's research showing that language models based on the Transformer neural network architecture and trained on dialog could learn to speak from practically anything.
Google and many well-known scientists were quick to dismiss them as flawed, claiming that LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.
Lemoine's firing was first reported by Big Technology, a technology and society newsletter.
