Google fires engineer for saying its AI self-aware

California: The tech giant Google informed on Friday that it had dismissed a senior software engineer after he claimed that the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was self-aware, Reuters reported.

Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., had put the engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month. Google said that he had violated the company policies and added that Blake's claims on LaMDA are totally unfounded.

Google told Reuters that it is regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on the matter, Blake chose to violate employment and data security policies, including the need to safeguard product information.

In 2021, Google informed that LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) was built on the company's research. The research showed showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about almost anything.

Google, along with many other prominent scientists, quickly dismissed Blake's views, saying that they were misguided. It contended that LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

A tech and society newsletter Big Technology reported Blake's dismissal first.