Google fires software engineer who claimed its AI chatbot is sentient

(Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person. Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded." Last year, Google said https://bit.ly/3Os9QqD that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - was built on the company's research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything. Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language. (Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by William Mallard)