I've been fired, says engineer who claimed Google chatbot was sentient
Google has reportedly fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who was placed on administrative leave after insisting the web giant's LaMDA chatbot was sentient.
"If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively. We found Blake's claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months. These discussions were part of the open culture that helps us innovate responsibly," the spokesperson said.
AI software is notoriously difficult to spin up and try for yourself even when it's open source. Bits and pieces of the source are left out, or the datasets required to train the model aren't available. Sometimes these parts are accessible, but developers don't have the computational power to wield such large systems., for example. The largest version of the language model contains 175 billion parameters.
They will also get to commercialize any images they generate using the model, too, meaning creators have rights to sell and print their pictures for merchandise and the like."We are excited to see what people create with DALL·E and look forward to users' feedback during this beta period," the research labThe controversial commercial online facial recognition service PimEyes can be used to search for"potentially explicit" pictures of children.
"The fact that PimEyes doesn't have safeguards in place for children and apparently is not sure how to provide safeguards for children only underlines the risks of this kind of facial recognition service," Jeramie Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was quoted as saying."Participating in public, whether online or offline, should not mean subjecting yourself to privacy-invasive services like PimEyes.