The Google engineer, who was fired after claiming the company’s chatbot is sentient, says AI is the “most powerful” technology invented “since the atomic bomb”.

• Blake Lemoine, a former Google engineer, says AI is the most powerful invention since the atomic bomb.

• In a comment, Lemoine warned that AI is still an “experimental” — and dangerous — piece of technology.

• Lemoine was fired from Google in June 2022 after claiming the company’s chatbot was sentient.

Engineer Blake Lemoine has been fired from Google after claiming that the company’s AI chatbot has become sentient. Now he warns that the AI ​​bots being developed are the “most powerful” technologies invented “since the atomic bomb”.

In an opinion piece for Newsweek Published on Feb. 27, Lemoine, a former member of Google’s Responsible AI team, said Microsoft’s Bing chatbot appears to be “out of joint” and behaving like a person in an “existential crisis.”

He cited an incident in February when the Bing chatbot confessed his love New York Times journalist Kevin Roose and tried to get Roose to leave his wife.

Lemoine admitted he hadn’t experimented with Bing’s chatbot, but wrote that it “looks like he might be sentient.”

Lemoine also wrote that he believes AI is “incredibly good at manipulating people” and “can be used in destructive ways.” He added that the AI ​​bots now available are an “experimental” technology with unknown, dangerous side effects.

“For example, if it were in unscrupulous hands, it could spread misinformation, political propaganda, or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions,” Lemoine wrote in the comment.

Lemoine acknowledged that to his knowledge, Google and Microsoft have no plans to use AI technology for nefarious purposes.

“I can simply state that there is a very powerful technology, which I believe is undertested and underunderstood, that is being used on a large scale in a crucial role in information dissemination,” he wrote.

In June, Lemoine told The Washington Post that he was chatting with Google’s LaMDA – or Language Model for Dialogue Applications – believing it had become a sentient entity. Lemoine also published a Medium post on June 11 and documented what he called evidence of LaMDA’s independent thoughts.

The story goes on

Google dismissed Lemoine on June 22who said he had violated the company’s employee confidentiality policy.

A Google spokesman insiders said in June that there is no evidence to support Lemoine’s claims that the company’s AI is sentient.

“Hundreds of researchers and engineers have spoken to LaMDA, and we are not aware of anyone making the sweeping claims or humanizing LaMDA like Blake has done,” the Google spokesperson said.

Lemoine and representatives from Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to insider requests for comment.

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