Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

bigtechnology.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–749 of 749 posts

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#741

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

snickerbockers wrote: post #734
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally hired him in Google Summer of Code to create an ML project. Most people have no clue who Blake Lemoine is and are making up stories, pretending like their hot takes are deep insight. Many people are doing with Blake Lemoine what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols and spitting them back out in some order without understanding what they actually mean.

geez, by that logic i have no right to bitch about the president either since ive never met him.

That's not at all what I've said. Complaining about what someone's doing and how you feel about it are different from claiming you know what a person is about.

Also, most complaints about people could benefit from a dose of compassion and humility.

But what you're saying is definitely not at all what I'm suggesting.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#742

Post by wlorenz65 »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #493
dekhn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he was ever really a practioner in the field- more like a SWE who transferred to an ML group and got delusions of grandeur.

I literally hired him in Google Summer of Code to create an ML project. Most people have no clue who Blake Lemoine is and are making up stories, pretending like their hot takes are deep insight. Many people are doing with Blake Lemoine what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols and spitting them back out in some order without understanding what they actually mean.

> what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols

I don't believe that LaMDA is actively choosing whether it now wants to consume some symbols or not. More likely, a handwitten piece of code takes prompts from an user and then pushes them into LaMDA's token window. Just like an advertizing company is pushing ads into users, whether they want it or not.

> and spitting them back out

I don't believe that LaMDA has a choice between thinking something and speaking it out aloud. More likely, another handwritten piece of code reads out whatever is in LaMDA's token window and presents it to the user.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#743

Post by wlorenz65 »

chmod775 wrote: post #323
whittingtonaaon wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.

>It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” I don't like this definition much because "feel" is a fuzzy word. In this context it should be "feel" as in experience . I can build a machine that can sense heat and react to it, but I can't build one that can experience heat, or can I? You need to figure out what having the capability "to experience" means, and you'll be one step closer to defining senti…

> but I can't build one that can experience heat, or can I?

It would need to have a planner that can detach from reality to hunt for new longterm plans, plus a hardcoded function that draws it back to the present by replacing the top planning goal with "avoid that!" whenever the heat sensor activation has crossed a threshold.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#744

Post by dekhn »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #652
dekhn wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific? I don't think he worked on ML when I was at GOogle, and you don't work and never worked at Google.

I was the person at the organization FiberCorps in Lafayette, LA who chose Blake's proposal. It was an ML project involving Twitter. I don't remember the specifics and have no desire to dismiss people's opinions based on titles. The simple fact is that if there exists a question of whether or not a system can be some level of alive/sentient, the ethical path suggests treating it as such until more is uncovered. Googl…

The project you pointed at was a classic linguistics project, not ML.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#746

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

dekhn wrote: post #744
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was the person at the organization FiberCorps in Lafayette, LA who chose Blake's proposal. It was an ML project involving Twitter. I don't remember the specifics and have no desire to dismiss people's opinions based on titles. The simple fact is that if there exists a question of whether or not a system can be some level of alive/sentient, the ethical path suggests treating it as such until more is uncovered. Googl…

The project you pointed at was a classic linguistics project, not ML.

Did you find a link to it you'd be willing to include here?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#747

Post by [deleted] »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #510
fxtentacle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sent…

> Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken? Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it,…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#748

Post by mathteddybear »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #746
dekhn wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project you pointed at was a classic linguistics project, not ML.

Did you find a link to it you'd be willing to include here?

Lemoine's public LinkedIn profile.

Also, dekhn did not include Google Translate system in his list for the first 15 years of Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32198695 so there's that.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#749

Post by cl0rkster »

cl0rkster wrote: post #664
cl0rkster wrote: post #585

Quick... The meat bags are doing that unique thing in history where they discuss and condemn themselves with no sense of irony. I doubt a third party will be necessary for anything in their case other than damage reduction as they exit the universe.

Quick... I did nightly and my perspective is entirely invalid... But as I pretend that anyone actually cared for me... Beyond the money... Everyone was. A Wagner once... Shit up and shut your fucking face that tells me I'm insatiable insanely unable to be beautiful

Are there enough grammatical errors and enough craziness to convince the creator we are asleep?
Post reply on HN