Fired engineer says Google is trying to be “safe and responsible” with AI.

• A Google engineer was fired after he said he had a feeling AI chatbots were “responsible.”
• Blake Lemoyne told Futurism that Alphabet wasn’t “swayed by OpenAI.”
• He said the company still has “much more advanced” technology that hasn’t been made public yet.

A Google engineer who was fired for saying an AI chatbot had gained sentience said the company is working on artificial intelligence in a “safe and responsible” manner.

Blake Lemoine, a former member of Google’s Responsible AI team, told Futurism that he doesn’t believe Google is “powered by OpenAI” and that the company behind ChatGPT has influenced “Google’s trajectory.” said he did not give

“I think Google is doing what they believe is a safe and responsible way. OpenAI just happened to release something,” he said.

Lemoine also claimed that Bard was in development in mid-2021, well before ChatGPT was released in late 2022.

“It wasn’t called the Bard at the time, but they were working on it and trying to determine if it was safe to release,” he said. I was on the verge of releasing something, which would have been released around the same time as ChatGPT or shortly before.Then, due to some of the safety concerns I raised, they removed it. “

The engineer, who joined Google in 2015, told Futurism that the company has “much more advanced technology” that hasn’t been released yet, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A product with essentially the same functionality as Bard may have been released two years ago, but Google said it was “frequently careful not to hoax and make sure it doesn’t include race or gender.” Prejudice, or political prejudice, that sort of thing.”

Lemoine told the Washington Post last June that after chatting with Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), he believes the Language Model for Dialogue Applications has become a sensation. said there is. He also shared an “interview” he gave LaMDA in his Medium post, claiming it was proof of LaMDA’s independent thinking.

He was fired later that month for allegedly violating Google’s confidentiality policy. A company rep told Insider at the time that his claims about his senses were unsupported and there was no evidence to suggest he was conscious.

Google did not immediately respond to an Insider’s request for comment outside of normal business hours.