A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine is claiming that its company chat artificial intelligence, LaMDA, has achieved sentience, releasing transcripts claiming to be evidence of the phenomenon. He was also put on leave following the release. Cheddar Anchors Kristen Scholer and Ken Buffa discussed the story that has tech junkies scratching their heads.

Closing Bell

Google Engineer on Leave After Claiming Company AI Is Sentient

Okay, ken a google engineer is on paid leave for allegedly breaking its confidentiality policies after claiming the company's Ai chatbot had become sentient that means it has emotions like a human while the tech giant placed blake Lemon on leave after he published transcripts of conversations between himself and the company's Ai chat interface called lambda. Well Lemon describing a chatbots system ascension with the ability to express thoughts and feelings that are equivalent to a human child. The engineer telling the Washington post quote if I didn't know exactly what it was, I think it was a seven year old, eight year old kid that happened to know physics and quote. Well, Lemon says lambdas advocating for its rights as a person and wants to be acknowledged as an employee of google rather than the property of google. Google is disputing this claim. Can this It forges to the forefront the biggest questions that people have out there about this technology, about artificial intelligence, about robots and that's the ethics behind it, right? How are these machines protected? Are they protected? And simply how do they interact with humans in an ecosystem that we've built. It's interesting because a lot of engineers around this and I was reading this story was kind of scratching my head and shaking my head because a lot of engineers agree that this new AI or this developed AI is not sent in the means that people think it's essentially So, lambda was looking up its language model for dialogue applications and what it does essentially defines patterns and predicting what words to use and what should come next. Much. Like if you're typing on an IOS device and you're typing out a sentence, it will predict what your next word would be. You wouldn't think for a second, your keyboard is sentient that it has emotions and feelings can think for your own. So just finding power patterns in your behavior to try to lean into that and give suggestions. But I can understand where people think well you know, perhaps it's too right on or perhaps its request are I guess predicting stuff that's a little too accurate, I understand that, but engineers when this came out all we're saying it's not what you think it is, nothing is gonna come and get you, you're in a good spot. And plus I think the fact probably that he went to the Washington post is employee right of google and made these comments on the record or presumably maybe you know on background and they were actually used quoted in a story perhaps that's something that is irking and an issue with google a bit here too, that it wasn't from google's own mouth right, but rather from an employee and it's interesting because I think it was the pixel five where they introduced or it was pixel six they introduced a feature with the google assistant where it can call a restaurant and make you reservations by just saying like hey google please call candor garten for reservation at six and it'll call a person will pick up a real person and the ai will speak on behalf of you to make the reservation, even answering to the real persons questions like table for two. At what time? It does, it does everything that way. No one scratched their head on that, It wasn't sentient then, but now we're getting into this and I feel like articles like this will be start to pop up more as the Ai gets broader and more, I guess precise. Yeah, it's, it's cool stuff.