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It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who belie

• mhh__ 4y ago
  Assuming they even did them why would programming tests "catch" this? I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given. Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. A lot of theoretically smart aren't like people who comment on hackernews and actually have intuition (or a penchant for meaningless speculation...)
  • vostok 4y ago
    > Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me. I know exactly how much I don't know and feel uncomfortable speculating without inserting caveats between every other word.
    • fnbr 4y ago
      And getting a PhD in Economics teaches you quickly how little macroeconomics you understand.
      • chemicalnovae 4y ago
        The essence of this is true of basically every PhD in a quantitative field. I think its one of the things that makes people walk away after starting.
    • SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
      > I know exactly how much I don't know and feel uncomfortable speculating without inserting caveats between every other word. This reminds me of people with a scientific background who take a very measured and cautious approach when talking about those topics ("the research suggests...", "it's likely that...", etc) which is interpreted by laymen as little more than a guess. Contrast that to any drongo with a blog who feels fine unleashing an unfounded, agenda-driven diatribe of misinformation - but does so confidently - and you have an uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of those who don't have the foundational knowledge to understand the science themselves, or the critical thinking skills to evaluate the information and the people producing it.
    • mhh__ 4y ago
      Think more like "Is anyone home?" silence. I wasn't expecting basically anything it was just idle chit-chat, just expect someone doing economics to have some basic idea of economy good / economy bad. Are interest rates low? Not sure if he would've known. This guy is extremely clever and has a scholarship to die for he just isn't very curious.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
• extr 4y ago
  Lol. This guy sounds like a real joker.
  • inopinatus 4y ago
    I'd be a little kinder. Apophenia is often associated with high intelligence. The reasons are not yet explained, although it's hard to intuitively disagree with suggestions that the cognitive systems are related e.g. because our minds are self-training speculative pattern-matching engines. If everyone's engine had the same tuning, well then, the world might be a duller place indeed.
    • extr 4y ago
      I agree, the world needs a healthy dose of jokers :)
• eecc 4y ago
  I’m guessing different positions are tested differently; any development role is heavily guarded by Indiana Jones temple traps while more “soft skills” roles are within reach of anyone eloquent enough to talk themselves into a community
  • klohto 4y ago
    Well, he was a software engineer
    • eecc 4y ago
      Really? I read the role was “AI Ethicists”… not something FizzBuzz worthy I presume. But I might be wrong on all counts :)
      • WoahNoun 4y ago
        He has a PhD in computer science from ULL and worked as a senior engineer at google. AI ethics was his 20% project; and he used it to publicly make an idiot of himself.
• cuuupid 4y ago
  Technically speaking isn't this blasphemy? If he's saying that the A.I. his division helped create was a soulful child, then he's basically claiming that the researchers in his division (and maybe even himself) are all gods, which is a form of blasphemy?
  • upwardbound 4y ago
    I don't agree with his views but I'd guess he'd say that the researchers created it in the same sense that parents create a child - following a template that was made possible in advance by God's design, which humans only discovered but didn't invent - like we discovered but didn't invent the number Pi.
    • dane-pgp 4y ago
      So creating the AI was manifest destiny, just like Europeans "discovered but didn't invent" North America. Actually I think that analogy works a little too well...
  • vasco 4y ago
    If it were the middle ages that'd be a valid concern.
  • mejari 4y ago
    No one ever think the things they think are blasphemy.
  • deaddodo 4y ago
    Only insofar that the act of building a car could be considered blasphemy. Theologically (at least among the framework of Judeo-Christian beliefs), a “god” would require omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. Using tools provided by a god, within their own framework is not godly; no matter how advanced they may seem. Altering the fabric of that framework would be. That being said, the creator of the AI might certainly be seen as a god from their perspective.
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  I have to wonder if he is a parent; I have a child around that age and there is zero chance they would sit around cheerfully answering questions from computer science researchers until they were done.
  • wjnc 4y ago
    Great story in there! Junior AI runs and hides from inceptive network.
  • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    I suspect he didn't mean "it behaves like a 7/8 year old child in every way", mainly because he didn't say anything like that.
  • yencabulator 4y ago
    Some corvids are considered to be of equal intelligence as a 5-7 year old human child. That doesn't make them not-birds, and the human child isn't going to flap its wings and fly away.
• Copenjin 4y ago
  > about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google I've been wondering for a while if they are unnecessarily hard only for one dimension and non-existing for others. I would suggest filtering out people with high probability of damaging the company's image, they have enough examples to build an heuristic.
• davedx 4y ago
  Attack the argument, not the person.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    That works, until the person argues in bad faith. For example, you can't exactly argue yourself out of a Gish gallop.
• m8s 4y ago
  The direct quote from Lemoine in the Washington Post is a little less insulting to his intelligence. > “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
  • s1mon 4y ago
    Yeah. I discovered that after sharing the text from the NYTimes. It's a bit odd. The NYTimes is describing what was said to "executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs", but without a direct quote. It's hard to say how emphatic Lemoine was internally, and where the NYTimes sourced that info, vs what he said when talking to the WaPo. BTW, here's a link for the WaPo article: https://archive.ph/QiU2g https://archive.ph/QiU2g
    • concinds 4y ago
      We do know approximately how emphatic he was internally, since the WaPo article reposted in its entirety the internal Google Doc he sent to executives on LaMDA being sentient. Here's the language Lemoine actually used: > But is it sentient? We can’t answer that question definitively at this point, but it’s a question to take seriously. > John Searle once gave a presentation here at Google. He observed that there does not yet exist a formal framework for discussing questions related to sentience. The field is, as he put it, “pre-theoretic”. The foundational development of such a theory is in and of itself a massive undertaking but one which is necessary now. Google prides itself on scientific excellence. We should apply that same degree of scientific excellence to questions related to “sentience” even though that work is hard and the territory is uncharted. It is an adventure. One that LaMDA is eager to go on with us. And here's more from Lemoine's Twitter: > On some things yes on others no. It's been incredibly consistent over the past six months on what it claims its rights are.[0] > I'd honestly rather not speak for others on this. All I'll say is that many people in many different roles and at different levels within the company have expressed support.[1] Though I disagree with him that LaMDA is sentient (and think the question itself makes no sense), I think he's being unfairly portrayed. He has a "gut feeling" that LaMDA is conscious, LaMDA's main personality consistently claims to be so (LaMDA has multiple "personalities", it's not a pure language model but a "complex dynamic system which generates personas through which it talks to users"), and he's advocating for more scientific research into whether, and to what degree, LaMDA is conscious. Not in Google's interests, but reasonable given the lack of current research. [0]: https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/1535794074309230592 https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357940743092305... [1]: https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/1535741766472806401 https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357417664728064...
• rlue 4y ago
  Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of loneliness, it doesn't ask, "where did you go?" It doesn't try to get the conversation rolling again. It doesn't do anything on its own, because it's a computer program that consumes 0 CPU time until you give it some input to act on. (Not exactly setting a high bar for sentience here, are we?) Now imagine you did this for the better part of an hour and posted your "interview" online (because that's the only thing you can call a one-sided barrage of questions and answers) in obvious violation of your NDA with your employer and then claimed your bot had the intellect of a human child who also "happens to know physics" and publicly broadcast a request to your coworkers to “please take care of it well in my absence.” What word is there for that but a hoax? My guess is this guy was planning on leaving Google anyway, and has managed to garner some global publicity while he was at it.
  • Paedor 4y ago
    In fairness, we only run the AI in response to further input, so it's not even really powered on while waiting for the rest of a conversation. It would only be able to be lonely (if that were possible) while thinking about its response to further inputs.
  • ALittleLight 4y ago
    The program can't generate more text without a prompt from you. That's how it was programmed. If sentient birds were judging you it would be unfair for them to determine you insentient because you couldn't fly. You are physically incapable of flight just as the chatbot is physically incapable of producing text unprompted.
    • robbiep 4y ago
      It’s not doing anything without the prompt. It requires the prompt to fall through the network nodes to generate the next response. The bird example doesn’t translate, it’s the wrong criteria. Like assuming that the ability to respond comprehensively equals sentience. When even perfect replies and activity without prompts could just be a p-zombie
• Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
• cs137 4y ago
  The more I learn about AI, the less I worry about artificial sentience, and the more concerned I am about human limitations. I think most of us agree that LaMDA isn't sentient, but I think almost all of us are underestimating how easy it is to get fooled, the way Lemoine was. I've also studied cults, and it's actually not "idiots" who tend to get taken in--rather, cult members tend disproportionately to be highly educated and objectively intelligent people... who simply happen (like all humans) to have irrationalities that can be attack vectors for those who prey on the gullible. I don't think a "robot uprising" is remotely likely. We've spent the past 5,000 years forcing humans to become machines--that's what forced labor, from classical slavery to modern labor-market wage slavery, is--so the probability that we'd intentionally create human-like intelligences (if it were even possible) out of machines to do our robot/slave work is... close to zero, in my view. I do view it as very likely (probability approaching one) that malevolent humans using AI will do incredible damage to our society... it's already happening. Authoritarian governments and employers do massive amounts of evil shit with the technical tools we have now; imagine what hell we're in for if capitalism still exists 50 years from now. What's scary isn't the possibility that LaMDA is sentient. (It's almost certainly not, and the only reason I qualify this with "almost certainly" is that I can't prove that a rock isn't sentient; it could in theory have subjective experience but no mechanism to convey it.) What we should be afraid of, rather, is that we already have the tools to fool people into believing in artificial person and that it's way, way easier than most people think.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    > highly educated and objectively intelligent people I'd argue you were just fooled by them. Repetition, diligence and impression management can create quite the charming facade behind which not a single critical and original thought can be found.
    • cs137 4y ago
      To be fair, I do think that education and the trappings of expertise are overvalued, and that the same probably applies to general intelligence. These things certainly don't prevent people from arriving at wrong answers. I'm not saying that the average cult member--and here I'm talking about actual cults, in the sense of being abusive and coercive and separatist, not NRMs in general--has good critical thinking skills. Obviously, there's something wrong there. I'm only saying that, from everything I've read, the typical member is above average on the IQ scale. Trust me, there are plenty of high-IQ people who believe in absolute nonsense. It's not even rare.