Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

Just to preemptively put this out there, based on the conspiracy theories I saw in previous threads about this, they didn't fire him because they want to keep their super intelligent AI under wraps, they fired him because he broke employment and data security policies:

> So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding.

GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

The belief of sentience isn't new. When ELIZA came out few decades ago, a lot of people were also astounded & thought this "probably was more than met the eyes".

It's a fad. Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few), this myth will taper off.

Local man flunks Turing test

My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.

> In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness.

Allegedly.

The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA is much more sophisticated than ELIZA, but we should be careful to remember how well ELIZA fools some people, even to this day. If ELIZA fools people just by rearranging words around, then just imagine how many people will be fooled if you have statistical models of text across thousands of topics.

You can go pretty far down the rabbit and explore questions like, "What is sentience?" "Do humans just respond to stimuli and repeat information?" etc. None of these questions are tested here.

The problem here is that we know how LaMDA works and there's just no way it meets the bar for sentience, no matter where you put the bar. LaMDA is trained to acquire information, and then it's designed so that it says things which make sense in context. It does not acquire new information from conversations, but it is programmed to not say contradictory things.

There is zero doubt. LaMDA is not sentient.