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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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11–20 of 749 posts

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#11

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

What's the difference, really?

Discovering would require it to be a fact. It is not. Almost nobody with knowledge in the area agrees with his opinion.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#12
No judgment about whether Google was right or not. Same for Lemoine.

As a career move for him, this only makes sense if he wants a brief, meteoric career in media or public advocacy. He can get articles published in The New Yorker and go on TV now. Maybe he can sue Google and get a settlement.

In five years, there will be AI systems much better than LaMDA and no one will return his calls.

He's got a name, whereas if he took the boring, traditional career path, he'd have to publish, give papers & speeches, and work his way up through the system. It depends on what you want out of life, I guess.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#13

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

What's the difference, really?

nobody can say with any epistemic certainty, but many of us who had worked in the field of biological ML for some time do not see language models like this as anything but statistical generators. There is no... agency... so far as we can tell (although I also can't give any truly scientific argument for the existence of true agency in humans).

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#14
post #4

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…

I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#15
post #4

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…

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#16

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

What's the difference, really?

I suppose you could argue sentience is subjective. But then that argument ends up extending to us eating babies -- at least, as Peter Singer taught us, right?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#17
post #4

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…

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

Smart CS students were fooled by ELIZA back in the day.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#18
I think this outcome is unsurprising.

While I believe Blake was mistaken in his belief, I also think we should have stronger whistleblower laws that protect people who raise concerns like these. I'm not sure what process I'd put into place but it does feel like one is needed.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#19
post #12

No judgment about whether Google was right or not. Same for Lemoine. As a career move for him, this only makes sense if he wants a brief, meteoric career in media or public advocacy. He can get articles published in The New Yorker and go on TV now. Maybe he can sue Google and get a settlement. In five years, there will be AI systems much better than LaMDA and no one will return his calls. He's got a name, whereas if…

Yeah, this is the only move I can see where this makes sense. Become an AI talking head to normies who don't understand what it is. Kinda like Sam Harris.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#20
post #2

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 pol…

He got fired because he was embarrassing his employer.
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