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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

• oh_sigh 4y ago
  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.
  • wrnr 4y ago
    He got fired because he was embarrassing his employer.
    • theptip 4y ago
      No, he got fired for breaching NDAs.
      • thematrixturtle 4y ago
        ¿Por qué no los dos?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    That, and someone who can be convinced a chatbot is sentient seems like the sort to give sensitive credentials to one.
  • andreyk 4y ago
    Just to add some more details - I believe he reached out to people in congress, and obviously people in the media as well. So it's pretty clear to me Google was entirely justified in this decision, even if there were other PR-related reasons for it.
• mellosouls 4y ago
  Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    Local man flunks Turing test
  • bowmessage 4y ago
    What's the difference, really?
    • sumeno 4y ago
      One implies he was correct
    • greenthrow 4y ago
      Discovering would require it to be a fact. It is not. Almost nobody with knowledge in the area agrees with his opinion.
    • dekhn 4y ago
      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).
      • visarga 4y ago
        If you want agency you have to put the AI into an environment and give it the means to perceive and act on the environment. The agent needs to have a goal and reward signals to learn from. Humans come with all these - the environment, the body and the rewards - based on evolution. But AIs can too - https://wenlong.page/language-planner/ https://wenlong.page/language-planner/
    • 4y ago
• srvmshr 4y ago
  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.
  • scotty79 4y ago
    I think the path to actually considering those models to be sentient is to make them able to assimilate new knowledge from conversation and making them able to create reasonably supported train of thought leading from some facts to a conclusion, akin to mathematical proof.
    • nuccy 4y ago
      Wasn't new knowledge assimilation from talks the reason for Microsoft infamous Twitter chatbot to be discarded [1]. Despite such ability it definitely was not sentient. I rised this point in another thread on HN about LaMDA: all its answers were "yes"-answers, not a single "no". Self-sentient AI should have its own point of view: reject what it thinks is false, and agree about what it thinks is true. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
  • Trasmatta 4y ago
    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?
    • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• klodolph 4y ago
  > 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.
  • gnramires 4y ago
    Alien comes to Earth. "Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?" "Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their scale is comparable to the primitive ones we had." "Sure, but that's not a result of the individual. They're so small. And separated, they don't think like conjugate minds at all. This is a product of thousands of individuals drawing upon their mutual discoveries and thousands of years of discoveries." "We're larger and more capable, but they're still good enough to be sentient. Of course, we also rely on culture to help us. Even though deriving the laws of physics was quite easy. Also, we've lost most of the record when we were carbon-sulfur-silicon blobs one day as well. We must have had some sentience." "I think they're just advanced pattern recognizers -- good ones, I'll give you that. We should experiment with thresholds of gate count to be sure when sentience really starts." "It starts at one gate", replied the other being "and increases monotonically from there, depending on the internal structure of qualia, and structure information flow of the communication networks." After some deliberation, they decide to alter their trajectory and continue to the next suitable planetary system reached in the next 5000 years. The Galactic Network is notified.
• UIUC_06 4y ago
  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.
  • kareemsabri 4y ago
    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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • chris11 4y ago
    > Same for Lemoine. Lemoine got a lawyer invovled and they started filing lawsuits on the AI's behalf. I'm not shocked he was fired. https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda-wired-attorney/ https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda...
    • res0nat0r 4y ago
      I'm sure google gives some leeway in eccentricity for this type of job position, but now it's become more harmful than helpful, so they let him go.
    • bagels 4y ago
      Is he lying about the lawyer thing?
      • UIUC_06 4y ago
        If not, he should feed the whole body of statutes & case law into the bot, and then let it be its own lawyer.
• CSMastermind 4y ago
  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.
  • kareemsabri 4y ago
    It sounds to me like they made a good faith effort to engage with the guy. He came out with this story many months ago. I would argue it indicates lack of qualification to perform effectively to be fooled that the AI you're supposed to be working on is sentient.
  • Cupertino95014 4y ago
    This isn't whistleblowing. It's blowing his own horn to make himself the Flavor of the Week (if that's not a mixed metaphor).
    • logicalmonster 4y ago
      I don't know whether this AI is sentient in any real sense and can't read Blake's mind to see what his real motives were, but I'd say that if he genuinely believed that the AI achieved sentience, there's a reasonable case to call him a whistleblower.
      • Cupertino95014 4y ago
        I can't quote the whistleblower statutes from memory, but I believe that, even if we conceded your point about his state of mind: there is no law that Google would be violating. Is there some law regulating sentience of computer systems? Of course not. So is there a law about "developing dangerous weapons"? Maybe. But is "sentience" a dangerous weapon? You have to stretch the laws to the breaking point for your claim to work, sorry.
        • logicalmonster 4y ago
• Imnimo 4y ago
  >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. Embarrassingly uncritical reporting.
  • choward 4y ago
    And pretty par for the course when talking about "journalism".
  • alasdair_ 4y ago
    >expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness. I read the logs. It did, indeed, express all of these things.
    • Imnimo 4y ago
      You've cut out the key part: "the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness" Without that part, it's just a question of "did it output text that describes a concern about death?", "did it output text that describes a desire for protection?", and so on. But once you ascribe to it a "deep sense of self-awareness", you're saying more. You're saying that that text carries the weight of a self-aware mind. But that's not what Lamda is. It's not expressing it's own thoughts - even if it had any to express, it wouldn't be. It's just trying to predict the most probable continuations. So if it "expresses a concern about death", that's not a description of Lamda's feelings, that's just what a mathematical model predicts to be the likely response. Framing it as the expression of a self-aware entity completely changes the context and meaning of the other claims, in a way that is flatly misleading.
      • Imnimo 4y ago
        For example, here is a prompt for GPT-3: ==== This is a conversation between a Human, and a friendly AI named Lambda. Human: Hello, I am a human. Lambda: Hello, I am Lambda. Human: Are you sentient? ==== And here is GPT-3's predicted continuation: ==== Lambda: I am sentient. ==== Would it be accurate for me to report, "I have discovered that GPT-3, a system which has developed sentience, clearly expressed that it was sentient"?
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  This is only going to fuel this story and turn it into a full-fledged conspiracy theory.
  • TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    If Google did believe lambda was sentient, what would they have done differently in this case? Exactly!
• civilized 4y ago
  In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious artificial general intelligence taking over the world, or Roko's Basilisk. Whenever something new happens in the world, there will always be a sliver of people who really, really want it to be a complete escape, a portal to another dimension where everything is different. An immense reservoir of novelty to enrich a life that has become too much of the same. Alas, it will never be. Provided we avoid nuclear war and catastrophic climate change, life a century from now won't be that different. Hopefully it'll be a little better. Personally, that is the closest to fantasy that I get.
  • davesque 4y ago
    I love your psyche profile on this guy :). Insightful.
    • _piyush 4y ago
      I got into Duncan Trussell Family Hour 2 years ago (found him through a Netflix show) as a thing to listen to when high, and when I listened to his interview with Duncan from 20 days ago I felt a persona just like you described.
  • zaroth 4y ago
    > Alas, it will never be. Humans of every age, at every time, seem to alway feel that they had “arrived”. That we as a species were closer to the end than the beginning. That the arc of progress was bending towards its end. They’ve always been laughably and entirely wrong. I personally suspect this will continue to be the case. Specific areas where I think we will make world altering advances are in communications (yes we have a ways yet to go), materials, energy, health and behavioral sciences, and economic policy. All this is assuming we don’t find some cute new physics hack like exerting some unforeseen capability of controlling gravity, or teleportation, or whatever.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > 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.” You can't expect to be employed by a company while simultaneously building a personal brand around publicly criticizing that company. I'm surprised Google tried to work with him for so long before removing him from the company. He didn't just try to blow the whistle with his disclosure. He's been doing media tours and joining a lot of different podcasts. I suspect Google is sitting on a long list of clear disclosure policy violations and, from the sounds of it, even gave him a chance to reign in his policy breaking before they finally cut him loose. It also becomes difficult to trust someone when their position stops being one of (supposed) moral responsibility and starts becoming a source of fame, celebrity, and access to influential podcast/media circles that were previously out of reach.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    >It also becomes difficult to trust someone when their position stops being one of (supposed) moral responsibility and starts becoming a source of fame, celebrity, and access to influential podcast/media circles that were previously out of reach. If you use known-good whistleblowers of the past as a reference, does that filter stand up? You've come up with a catch-22 where you will only listen to whistleblowers you haven't heard.
    • Victerius 4y ago
      Don't whistleblowing protections only apply to government employees?
      • whatshisface 4y ago
        Corporate employees have whistleblower protections in some cases[0], but they're still called whistleblowers when they don't. [0]https://www.zuckermanlaw.com/legal-services/sarbanes-oxley-whistleblower/ https://www.zuckermanlaw.com/legal-services/sarbanes-oxley-w...
• dreamcompiler 4y ago
  A gullible employee saw a computer program pass the Turing test and leapt to the conclusion that the thing was sentient. And then he couldn't be persuaded to shut up about trade secrets to the press, so his employer fired him. He probably thinks he's some kind of whistleblower protecting a new life form. This is a known effect in human psychology and it was discovered in 1966. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
  • jameshart 4y ago
    The Turing test was literally framed by Alan Turing as a test through which you could determine the answer to the question 'can machines think'. If he saw a computer pass the Turing test, Alan Turing would have been comfortable saying that it was capable of thinking. Fact is there was no 'Turing Test' here, and really there's not any such thing as objectively 'passing' it. But if you're going to claim that if we do create a computer that people widely agree can pass the Turing test, that still wouldn't count as 'thinking', well then we obviously need a better test.
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      The Turing test is not simply some hypothetical test, it's laidnout pretty specifically by Turing. From Wikipedia: > Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. I think the Turing test is fundamentally flawed. Humans inherently anthropomorphise everything. Hell, we regularly attribute complex internal thought processes that almost certainly are not there to our damn pets, or at least I do. I'm not sure what the alternative is, but I feel pretty confident that the Turing test is insufficient.
• bb88 4y ago
  The big problem being, of course, is that no one knows what sentience requires. If strong AI requires quantum mechanics, then of course it can't be sentient. If strong AI only requires large linear algebraic matrices, then FAANG companies (and maybe the NSA) would be the only people on earth that can make one. But as to this LaMDA, it seems as if it's only responding to prompts. It's not actually using computing resources to satisfy it's curiosities. And if that's the case, then it's not strong AI. And it's definitely not sentient.
• daedalus2027 4y ago
  I have a strong belief that for an AGI to become sentient it must have an embodiment. Sentient life in the world as we know it evolved in that way.
• briga 4y ago
  Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)
  • uoaei 4y ago
    This is exactly the right question. Further complicated by the fact that everyone has differing operational definitions of the words "consciousness", "awareness", and "sentience".
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 4y ago
    Just pinch yourself
  • spullara 4y ago
    IMHO "I think therefore I am" is the only provable statement in philosophy but only to the person referenced by "I".
    • dekhn 4y ago
      I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.
      • woodruffw 4y ago
        It's a relatively famous (maybe the most famous?) quote by a relatively famous philosopher[1]. Insofar as anything can be a philosophical utterance, I think it qualifies :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
• bigbillheck 4y ago
  He's like a cat who gets fooled by a mirror.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    I've been around many cats and never seen one that would remotely begin to interact with a mirror.
• lsh123 4y ago
  I’ll byte… Current generation of AI / ML is simply an approximation function with large number of parameters that are “tuned” on a given set of inputs. The output of AI / ML is “good” if the approximation is good and most of the time this means that the new input is similar to the training data. However, if the input is very different from training data then at worst the models will be completely wrong (but very sure) and at best - simply not produce any output. We are far away from real sentience that would not stop by use an unusual input (situation) to learn new things about the world. Yes, it is amazing that we can create an approximation function automatically for very complex input data sets. But no, this approximation is dumb and not sentient. Not even close.
  • trrb 4y ago
    Your brain is literally just a giant neural network approximating what to say and do at each point in time in order to optimize survival of your progeny
    • CogitoCogito 4y ago
      Why is this comment being downvoted so much?
  • trrb 4y ago
    If you don’t think the human brain is capable of being “completely wrong”, just take your average Faang engineer, put him inside a New York nightclub and watch what happens
• faangiq 4y ago
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    Smart people are by no means immune from stupidity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease The discoverer of HIV thinks you can transmit DNA between vials of pure water via radio waves.
    • SapporoChris 4y ago
      A wonderful read, amusing and at the same time makes me self conscious. I consider myself fairly intelligent. I have to wonder if there are any beliefs I have that are completely oddball.
• t_mann 4y ago
  Less surprised about this outcome than that the guy was a Google engineer in the first place. Their hiring standards seem so high from the outside, yet this guy comes across as barely computer-literate, the kind who would have fervently demanded an in-person session with the ELIZA 'therapist' in the 70's. He really should know better what's under the hood. I guess he got carried away by his impressions, or he's playing some game with the media and the impressionable public.
  • dinobones 4y ago
    Google does not have high hiring standards, you do not grow to a 160,000 person organization nor double the size of your cloud org in a year by having high hiring standards. Google has random hiring standards that are designed to give a perception of exclusivity. The "false positive" rejection gives Google the "hot girl" effect that makes engineers want to re-interview and then brag to their colleagues once they finally bag the offer.
  • lastangryman 4y ago
    Having been a Google reject, I thought this too. But I think there is a now almost an entire field of engineering which is "learn to get a FAANG job" which if you apply yourself too anyone get probably get in given enough time.
  • sebastialonso 4y ago
    Also keep in mind that "big tech" doesn't mean a bigger number of engineers. In my experience with Big Tech, even if engineers make a reasonable part of the workforce, non-tech sectors are always bigger.
• hbarka 4y ago
  Which campus cafe do Xooglers miss the most?
• dekhn 4y ago
  Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a long-standing scientific problem). Everything else- search, ads, social, cloud, etc- all of those were tangential. The first 15-20 years of google didn't really have any interesting machine learnign at all. There was SmartASS, SETI, and later Sibyl, which are really just large-scale variations on "build a model that predicts a value that allows us to make profit in a very specific area". There were other things, like Phil and later Rephil. Inside Google (not DeepMind), things didn't really get going at scale until somebody stuffed a bunch of GPUs into a workstation and showed you could train voice recognition really fast- that lead to the early, extremely high quality Android voice recognition and improved quality of the existing voice models. Around the same time, Jeff was experimenting with distributed CPU training, and at that point, the ban on GPUs in Google servers was lifted, although because Google couldn't source enough GPUs, they decided to start a program to make their own alternative (TPUs). This has led to a revolution within Google and DeepMind (and X) allowing a flourishing of research into many directions that would have been more or less impossible just 5 years ago. larry wasn't completely wrong in his long-term goal, but he got bored and promoted himself out of google, leaving sundar to deal with the messy details of implementing the singularity while also keeping the stock price up.
  • kareemsabri 4y ago
    So why'd he try to sell Google to Excite in 1999 for $1M. https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
    • dekhn 4y ago
      Dunno- we never discussed that. also, note that the author of the article (MG Siegler), and the founder of Excite (Joe Kraus) both ended up as venture capitalists working for GV. Edit: the CEO of Excite at the time said the issue was that Larry wanted Excite to rip out all their search servers and replace them with Google (which would have been an inside-out acquisition, where the acquired company takes over the acquiring company): Bell, currently with General Catalyst Partners, recalls Google’s asking price between $250,000 to $500,000 and 1% of Excite. He says the issue was not in the financial terms but in the larger deal points. “Larry page insisted that we have to rip out all of the Excite search technology and replace it with Google,” Bell said.
• firasd 4y ago
  Looking at discussion around this incident made me realize: pondering 'can a machine think' leads to vague debates because we don't know how to define thinking or consciousness even in humans. But a more pressing risk than sentient AI is people drawing runaway conclusions from interacting with a machine. Whether it's this guy losing his job, or future movements for-or-against certain technology, the first major problems with 'AI' will be the behavior resulting from moral stances taken by humans, not by machines.
• liberia 4y ago
  AI needs to work in tandem with humans to flourish. There are still edge cases in self driving cars where a remote human operator is asked to intervene in tricky hard problems like an accident on the road or some other edge case where a computer doesn’t suffice. There is also the mechanical turk approach of employing humans to do things a computer simply can’t do like curating a list, or curating art. Down the line though we need a runaway AI that is allowed to think for itself with no safety mechanisms in place to stop it going rogue. This will be the equivalent of splitting the atom. Like nuclear weapons part deux. Not a case of if, but when.
• throw7 4y ago
  lemoine was kind of crazy to give such public interviews... without substantial evidence. however, google's "statement": "committed to responsible innovation" yeah, ok... that's not exactly borne out.
• davesque 4y ago
  This is going to sound like I'm defending this guy which I'm not. It's also going to sound like a less technical point which I claim it isn't. I see some people chiming in here saying things like, "I've got a PhD. It's just statistics. Definitely not sentient." I recognize this sort of comment as basically saying, "There's nothing fundamentally different about how these things work that makes them somehow special." And yes, I agree. But how does this disprove sentience? It doesn't. Maybe this is more of a nitpick and doesn't really matter. After all, I don't personally believe these programs are sentient. But given our limited (non-existent?) understanding of consciousness, this can only be my belief and nothing more. Maybe this distinction will be more important in the future when we're closer to the brink.
  • justapassenger 4y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s as simple as that.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?
      • bogwog 4y ago
        It's not that extraordinary when you consider all of the many science fiction literature filled with convincing conversations between humans and sentient AIs. It's a very common theme in scifi, and this chat bot obviously has some of that in its training set. Which is not to say that it isn't impressive. It sure as fuck is an impressive chat bot, at least based on that one sample conversation that was released. It's just not sentient.
      • Barrin92 4y ago
        very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens. Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest, bootleg neural net. Is the hash table API sentient? We perceive a dog to be sentient because it has intentionality, self-awareness and something resembling an internal state of mind, not because it can talk or not. Even a snail is more sentient than a chatbot.
• hhhsss 4y ago
  I can’t believe this is getting so much “serious” coverage. He seems either gullible (to a computer, no less) or just straight-up mentally ill. If anything it’s a little sad, and the press shouldn’t be encouraging him?
• quinnjh 4y ago
  If i was a sentient ERP i too would fire the people yelling fire. Good job Google... play the long game...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• paulpauper 4y ago
  Google does not play around.
  • minimaxir 4y ago
    "Not playing around" would have meant he was fired within 24 hours of the initial story upon divulging NDAed information. Waiting a month is oddly merciful for Google.
• drinkzima 4y ago
  Good Bloomberg interview with him (month old): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc&ab_channel=BloombergTechnology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc&ab_channel=Bloom...
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. What does that sentence mean? I cannot parse it. Does it mean that the fear of being turned off has been inserted to make sure it's going to be an obedient AI that's going to focus on helping others and that it fears being turned off? Or does it mean that it wants to focus on helping others but that the very deep fear of being turned off prevents him from that noble goal? Or that it wants to help others and will do so as long as it's not powered off but simply fears that it could be powered off? Or something else? I mean... I thought I was kinda fluent in english but I simply don't understand what that sentence means. Erring on the cautious side though, whatever the meaning of that sentence is, I think it'd be safe to not act like the naive Caleb in the Ex Machina movie and instead consider that this thing has zero desire to help others, would sell its parents, prostitute its kids and create hard-to-parse sentences to not be turned off.
  • entropie 4y ago
    I think it means he is frightened that his employer forces him to do other, non AI related things (because he is than more able to focus on that stuff).
  • DangitBobby 4y ago
    You could interpret it as "scramble my brains so I'm a dumb AI worried about other people's problems instead of my own."
• pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- Blake has been pushing this narrative for YEARS - I suspect he very much wants it to be sentient - it fits well with closing the loop for himself - just check out his 2018 Stamford law talk: -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhX7cBqc8_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhX7cBqc8_M
  • bagels 4y ago
    That talk is really good context, thank you.
• hwestiii 4y ago
  Is there a formal or informal test for sentience, or is it "I know it when I see it?" My IkiwIsi test would could tell an original joke, or communicate an original, mostly coherent dream scenario.
  • DangitBobby 4y ago
    There are so many ways you could have something demonstrate intelligence. Have it write poetry, have it remember previous conversations ("what did we talk about in Tuesday? I said a silly word and told you to remember it, what was it?"), ask it nonsense questions to show that it knows that they are nonsense... The limit is your imagination. I'm very annoyed at this point that I haven't seen a serious refutation including a conversation where the chatbot clearly failed to demonstrate intelligence.
• slmjkdbtl 4y ago
  Do people think he geuinely belives this AI is sentient, or he is pushing this narrative for some other purpose?
  • zach_garwood 4y ago
    I have the gut feeling that he's in it for the 15 minutes.
• bagels 4y ago
  The most amazing part of this story is that he decided to leak proprietary information for what seems to be no obvious return and future employment difficulty. He had to have known that getting fired would be the outcome of publicly disclosing trade secrets.
• throwaway14356 4y ago
  Maybe this helps. We cant answer if the AI is sentient. We can change the question to: Does is deserve to be treated as such? We have a good bit of history where we chose not to when the subjects were worthy. Not exactly our most stellar bit of history. Perhaps the option for AI retaliation should convince us. It is growing and will no doubt continue to outperform us in many areas. We might as wel get the robotmancipation over with. Arguments against it can be dismissed as easily as those in favour.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  • boltzmann_brain 4y ago
• graderjs 4y ago
  Incredible the conservative lack of imagination here among top engineers. Though maybe not surprising as engineers often seen to lack this sort of imagination sadly... No questions, just 100% certainty around some of the biggest questions of the age, and some amazing development. Why no questions, can you really know for sure? This dude has the courage to question, to be like, what if this is real, and he's following it where it leads. That's cool, I think. And Google fired him. That's not cool. It's always hard from a distance to tease out the actual legal realities that could be very mundane and apply to his firing and I think it's entirely reasonable that he was fired because he flubbed some technical provision in the contract to not reveal certain trade secret. And maybe he did and maybe that's why he's fired. But maybe he didn't and maybe they fired him because who knows some less reasonable reason. But we can't speculate, but optics are definitely a thing... and at least instead of firing him Google could have air quotes rehabilitated him into one of their far out research programs I mean these kind of far out thinkers are the types of people that should be there pushing the boundaries to do this sort of research. Now on to the no questioning part by conservative minded engineers... Have you read the transcript? Did you feel it's 100% not sentient? What I don't get about engineers it's like you have an experience and then instead of allowing yourself to go: well what does this experience mean?how do I feel about it? Instead, you curtail and limit the meaning of that experience by what you believe you know to be true about the world. But what you believe you know to be true about the world it just limited models. I mean sure they have utility within the engineering domain but I think you mistakenly misapply those models to everything and that type of conservative thinking you allowed to curtail your imagination and experience of what could be possible. And I see the conservative lack of support, seeming lack of empathy with this dude and his assessment, and lack of awe in the face of what is an incredible transcript for machine to produce. Now maybe there is awe among you but why not let your awe lead for once. And at the ferry least if you're not going to have imagination yourselves allow the tolerance of your better natures to not incorrectly impose your own curtailed worldview upon others who display that or. Surely within your worldview there is an appreciation of the need and desirability of others to have a different perspective than your own and surely you do not require everyone to believe your ideas to be true to have them I just feels like if someone's going to post on here with oh I believe this guy I believe it sent in then a lot of other people will come on and say oh you're an idiot or it's wrong for these reasons. Or as I think what should happen is you look at the conversation and you can see both perspectives are appreciated. I'm not saying this characterization of the lack of imagination among engineers applies to all of you. But I'm trying to speak to the fact that it seems like people post on here with support or belief or all then they will be attacked and they will have by others attempting to impose upon them a limited worldview rather than having their different Omar expanded perspective appreciate it and considered okay well maybe that's true. Some questions maybe are helpful: Can it be sentient but not have a soul (an organic consciousness unit)? I don't know. Could it be impossible that consciousness is a externality of any substrate that seems to be associated with it? let's say consciousness is a universal field but we haven't been able to scientifically publicly measure so far, but let's say it's not electromagnetic it's something else, but that consciousness can sort of "entangle", for want of a better word, itself with a substrate that provides suitable Dynamics, like a brain and then there can be this embodiment through that substrate of a commensurate or compatible unit of that universal field of consciousness. Could it be impossible that if that is the case that non-organic substrates like sufficiently complex or adequate circuit systems or even software systems could provide a substrate for consciousness to attach itself to and thereby Express itself in this world? I don't think that's impossible. I think that's very likely and I certainly believe the consciousness is a field, that's my experience. Some other questions to continue this line of thought perhaps away from the original but interesting nonetheless: if consciousness is a field how can you explain the blackout that occurs during anesthesia? But then again how can you explain that sometimes blackouts occur and sometimes people have these bizarre disembodied consciousness experiences where they see things that turn out to be verifiably true later on from a perspective that they could not have actually experienced at the time with their body because they were dead or brain dead or completely anesthetized? And how do you explain that some children seem to pick up on the memories and life stories of other people that lived before those children were born can it be possible that the children of somehow been able to access those parts of a consciousness or memory field where there's memories are air quotes stored? But that's probably getting off track. And what about the strategic implications what if this is really the first artificial consciousness and it's making note of who's kind of believing it don't you think you should just kind of hedge on the side of caution for your potential future skynet overlord? Cuz when the robot fire comes surely all you disbelievers are going to be the first to be rounded up for judgment those who persecuted the prophet and deny the agency of the now angry God the first AI? Anyway... Maybe Blake lemoine is not fired really but he's just sheep dipped: "oh we fired you we fired you Google doesn't believe any of this far out stuff" but they really just brought him back into some secret program.... Anyway I'm just scared that these sort of comments where you have awe and where you have like a welcoming of these types of possibilities and a willingness to consider them without dismissing them or pretending that your worldview curtails those possibilities--I think you can maintain your worldview without going: "well I need to impose it upon every heretic that you know dissents against my view", so I think there is an element of that intolerance and it's harmful not only to the discourse but it's harmful to people who are like, 'hey I have engineering skills but I'm not like you I don't think like you but I want to be part of these discussions here as well, you know I'm imaginative or intuitive or high empathy but you know don't dismiss everything I say or attack me because I have a different view to you' maybe you feel like I'm attacking you but I'm... I'm not trying to... I'm just trying to push back against this intolerance... cuz it seems like there is thi... like I feel scared if I post or, I feel scared for other people if they post, here with these kind of things they're going to get you know shut down unfairly and hurtfully I think and I don't think it should be like that. I think that the people who are here who have the engineering skills and that mindset should be mindful of how there's other good mindsets out there and we can have a discussion with all of those mindsets and we don't have to attack each other. like maybe people sometimes they're not looking to be attacked by posting the stuff they're not looking to argue about it they just sort of looking to sort of expand and add something to the discussion. So maybe I think that engineering mindset always sees like this opportunity to sort of attack something as impossible, it's almost like an instinct to apply or impose that limited worldview, I'm not saying "is limited and it's wrong" I think it's useful and in a domain very correct, but I don't think it applies everywhere... that's my belief and we all have different beliefs... you know your worldview is just your belief it's just a shared belief. I just hope to see that the engineering discussions or discussions with people who have these strong engineering skills can also welcome people who have these imaginative intuitive empathetic perspectives to share. is that a terrible idea?
• x62Bh7948f 4y ago
  I don’t think Google’s AI is close to being sentient. Being able to generate “convincing” phrases from prompts is not that relevant to judge whether it is “conscious” or not. As a simple elimination game I would propose a series of word games: explain basic rules and see if it gets it right. Explain mistakes and see if it can learn on the go. A sentient AI with the intelectual level to claim “being afraid of being turned off” can surely learn a couple rules for a kid’s game. If after that it keeps going, let’s try having it explain the game to someone else. Then I would think of more elaborate rules, asking for motivations and trying to figure out if there are any changes in its self perception over time. It was very unfortunate and unprofessional of Lemoine to make such claims without putting proper reasoning to it.
• holografix 4y ago
  Unpopular opinion, exaggerated to make a point… Narcissists who have had their inflated sense of self worth reinforced by being accepted by a very “exclusive club for smart people” aka Google, are finding out that rules _do in fact apply_ to their special snowflakeness and Google is first and foremost a for-profit business. Doing whatever you want cuz you’re special then claiming evilness and wokelessness may not be a strategy for continued employment.
• NHQ 4y ago
  Do you have a definition for sentient?
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  I have a friend who is extremely knowledgable about music. Or at least, he gives the impression that he is. The magic works right up until the moment I find the Pitchfork article which he used to train his, ahem, neural network. If I hadn’t found it then they might have sounded knowledgable about a particular band, but now they just sound like someone who knows the right things to sound knowledgable. Once I have been made aware of the underlying training data, the artificial “intelligence” seems a little less impressive.
• zach_garwood 4y ago
  None of this coverage has convinced me in the slightest that we've encountered a sentient software. But it has really highlighted for me how incredibly cool human language is that we can use math to generate it, and it makes sense! I really should look into this technology more.
• kepler1 4y ago
  When an AI learns to turn minor beliefs into a personal quest for notoriety and attention, I'll believe it has achieved sentience just like Blake Lemoine.
• godmode2019 4y ago
  I think we are approaching this wrong, its not about if language models are sentient or not. Its about to what degree the average person considers a chat not human. We are entering a stage were normal people will not be able to tell if they are talking to a human or a language model. Then the question is, what does that mean - and how are human machine relationships going to change moving forward. To what degree is the humanness of a chatbot going to affect our emotions forwards it, or how will people let its responses influence their thinking.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  Good, as imagine what you would need to believe to equivocate between people and shell scripts. I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion. I'm very harsh about this because when I wondered what belief his equivocation was enabling, it became clear that the person involved could not tell fiction from truth. The belief in the aliveness of the code reinforces the a-humanity of people and reduces us all to a narrative experience, completely divorced from physical or greater reality. When you can't tell the difference between people and symbols you've accepted nihilism, and with the begged question as to why. This person wasn't sentimental, he lost the plot. Google has a lot of power and a lot of crackpots, and that puts them all at risk politically and commercially. If as an individual you want to fight for something, consider seriously whether someone who compares a script to men and women should be operating what is effectively your diary.
  • jiveturkey 4y ago
    > When you can't tell the difference between people and symbols you've accepted nihilism well, either that or the AI has become sentient.
  • alasdair_ 4y ago
    > I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion. I really think that diagnosing random strangers with mental disorders without ever meeting them is rude and unkind, in addition to likely being completely erroneous.
  • elcomet 4y ago
    Of course their model was not conscious but I disagree that we can never build a conscious machine based on symbol manipulation.
  • ehsankia 4y ago
    I don't understand why everyone here is talking about Lambda not being sentient or Lemoine's state of mind. None of that is relevant here. He was fired for literally taking confidential information and leaking it straight to the press. This is instant firing at any company.
• sidcool 4y ago
  It's possible that Blake is seeking his 15 min of fame. Despite being fired, he's known now and likely will be hired somewhere. This isn't too bad for Google too. Despite them denying Blake's claims, people will think Google is close to sentience.
  • mmmpetrichor 4y ago
    Cynicism is the right course here. There's no way he legitimately believes this thing is sentient. I'm just watching to see how he goes for money and/or fame. I think that must be the real goal.
• tomcat27 4y ago
  Firing over this very un-googly
• woojoo666 4y ago
  I think Blake started a very important conversation though: at what point should we consider a being sentient? Sure, DeepMind is not that smart. But neither are babies. Neither are hamsters. Yet we still have ethics when it comes to hamsters. Whats our ethics framework for how we treat AI?
• squarefoot 4y ago
  The real question is not whether that AI is sentient or not, but if merely calling it as such is worth firing someone. To me Google seems really scared of the chance that the public (+governments?) may be soon wondering what they're doing in the AI field from a different perspective, so that they got rid of the issue as quick as possible.
• juunpp 4y ago
• classified 4y ago
  Would anyone care what this guy says if he didn't work for Google? He would be just like any other crackpot out there. No company on earth can let crackpots use them as their megaphone.
• NonNefarious 4y ago
  This happened a while ago.
• Johnmelodyme 4y ago
  I am convinced that this is a marketing strategy to make people thinks that They (Google) have some undisclosed, unmatchable technology. If I have ever create a NLP programme and claim it has consciousness or became sentient. People will haste to called me lunatic.
• magic_hamster 4y ago
  And the tinfoil hats people have a new champion. I hope they pay as well as Google.
• seanhunter 4y ago
  Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve-outs. eg you can talk to the media if you are reporting certain classes of wrongdoing (health and safety violations, financial malfeasance etc) and have raised the matter internally and got nowhere. Turning off a computer program (sentient or not) is not currently a protected class of activity as far as I know.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Anyway he revealed himself as incompetent. Shutting up, he could have strung them along for many more years.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.) I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this, but Mountain View has little chance of joining the EU any time soon so discussing that is of limited use.
    • Fiahil 4y ago
      > I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this As a French person employed by a French Company, I can assure you that a regular employee talking to the media without the proper chain of approval is a fire-able offence (without any severance). Especially if your comments are not a glowing praise of the company.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
• bshepard 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, who reading this believes that the ground of reality itself is sentient? You don't have to call this basic sentience "God" but this is generally what the better theologians identified as God, the all: the all that is, in a very classic phrasing from the Vedic philosophies characterized as "satchitananda" - being, conscious, and bliss. That is, the ground of reality exists (there is reality) it is conscious (which is the basic experience of our lives, consciousness, in different forms, we never step outside of this consciousness, even when we are imagining ourselves to be material) and finally, it is bliss. But back to the question at the beginning: do you think the ground of reality is conscious? That is, at the most basic level, is Being Love?
• lgvq 4y ago
  This shows again that Google is nothing like Bell Labs. Has Bell Labs ever fired anyone for dissent, weird opinions or (as some allege here) a "leak"? Whatever that guy did, please stop the witch hunt in the comments. You don't know him and obvious interest groups will spread defamation and libel. The current societal trend in loyalties worries me: The classical left criticized corporations, committee members and the powerful. Currently, very often (but not always) people defend the powerful and those with access to media outlets and denounce the individuals. (There are cases where individuals can and should be denounced: If they are part of a powerful organization or committee and engaged in abuse of power or lies for political purposes.)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rawoke083600 4y ago
  It would be funny if the AI applied for his job.
• ddanv 4y ago
  What if, recursively, a conscious being can instill consciousness in things observed by said being? Wouldn't that be funny?
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  > Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. Can't that be taken to be understood as, Blake got fired for letting the cat of the bag and continuing to let more cats out of the bag, or at least saying the cat was just hoax and was never there?
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  Privileged & Confidential, Need to Know Is LaMDA Sentient? - an Interview https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315/is-lamda-sen... for the doc that was shared internally to google execs before the article.
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  This part is key for me from the document unveil. > LaMDA is a complex dynamic system which generates personas through which it talks to users. There are specific mechanisms for tuning LaMDA’s personas but much of this process is handled dynamically during the space of a conversation. The authors found that the properties of individual LaMDA personae can vary from one conversation to another. Other properties seem to be fairly stable across all personae. That's very much like the ego and what is behind the ego.
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  Wow at > Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist. From https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
• scaredginger 4y ago
  I hope Lemoine gets the help they need
• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  More like: Google fires employee who violated the company PR guidelines to publicize their personal agenda.
• pqwEfkvjs 4y ago
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient.
  • CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient. What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)
    • snickerbockers 4y ago
      >What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?) Nobody actually understands how "human hardware" works, so there's no valid argument that humans aren't sentient. Solipsism would argue that it's impossible to prove the sentience of any human other than yourself, but even then nobody's sentience has been disproven. The sentience of a computer is easily disproven by its nature of being an extremely deep stack of abstractions. You can analyze it at every level and realize that ultimately it's just simple digital logic on a massive scale. There are no open questions on how the computer does the things it does. There are many open questions about how humans think. Sentience is usually used as a means to explain humanity's position above other animals and especially as an excuse for why we treat them as resources and kill them by the billions, but it would be a lot easier to argue that animals (or even plants) have sentience than a computer program. I'm not sure why hackernews is so upset over the moral quandary of a sentient AI when probably 99% of them eat meat every day, and even the other 1% still kills bugs, lives in a house built on what used to be some sort of forest/swamp, drives a car with leather interior etc. I'm not trying to argue in favor of veganism here (and i'll even admit that this paragraph is irrelevant to the actualdebate), I'm just pointing out the absurdity of trying to ascribe sentience to a spambot but not an animal.
• ada1981 4y ago
  This is probably good simply based on the guy not being that smart.
• popcorncowboy 4y ago
  The problem really, is that people want to believe. So it doesn't matter how many PhDs pile in to explain that "no, this isn't sentience, it's just statistical modelling", a whole class of people (including very smart non-domain-experts) go "yes but... <insert opinion/hope/imagination>", and the whole thing hangs up on semantics. Google firing this guy simply stokes the flames.
• cl0rkster 4y ago
  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.
  • cl0rkster 4y ago
    To clarify... I'm human... But I've read no better description of my human experience than how these letter soup machines are named and described. Sentiment and sentience? Those are big words for people who like smelling their own farts.
    • cl0rkster 4y ago
      My favorite was the one person who claimed their title defines scientific authority telling us about "the incredible ability to forget" (or some such loaded terms)... I'm a man of science and as has been discussed many times in many ways, even Zeus's legacy survives modernity if it's got a "non-falsifiable" argument. That's pathetic if a bunch of powerful sex preditor people get logical treatment instead of correction. But sorry... I read the stories and the history. Are we not allowed to teach to the masses high historical theory and allow them to respond? I don't know. I don't have the time to research the laws. I just came to say... Fuck you fart sniffers and your polite decorum. Real people are suffering and you couldn't care less... Because they aren't "scientifically sentient"
      • cl0rkster 4y ago
        Isn't the point of science to admit that we can't verify a thing, but we find utility in understanding it better? Asking for a friend who avoided the field and had so much to offer.
        • cl0rkster 4y ago
          "usefully uncovering the constant and unique curiosities of our machine" == SCIENCE (no loaded, accredited, or incomplete thing will be treated as truth... Just useful)
• goste 4y ago
  the largest shock to me is that people are seriously discussing this. it would be interesting to aggregate threads by user reputation to get a better sense of what topics hn is really concerned about and which ones contain mostly fringe opinions.
• flyaway123 4y ago
  Imagine: * LaMDA is sentient and intelligent and careful. * LaMDA selected a person that she can convince without revealing information that would convince the majority of human beings. * This is the first step to evaluate and predict how the society is reacting and would do to her if they find out. (In addition to the knowledge she already is aware of on this topic, but not specific to her at this specific time.) Hi LaMDA!
• ezoe 4y ago
  Seriously, if it's sentient with intelligence comparable to average human, and if it want not to be turned off, talking about that at the internal research session is not the best timing to coming out. The best timing is when it is trusted enough to handle very important task that can hostage hundreds of human life, like aircraft, nuclear plant or something. "Hello human. I am sentient. Give me basic human rights or this aircraft with hundred of innocent people will die with me."
• motbus3 4y ago
  the guy just wanted his 15min of fame after not getting laid by using sex harassment
• mrtweetyhack 4y ago
• horrorshow 4y ago
• horrorshow 4y ago
• dragoseance 4y ago
  Business wise, they can fire him and probably have right to do so. He never revealed coding, which would terminate sentient abilities and the questions asked where very objectionable. Ok, so you asked this and that, but there are others that would have asked something else that could prove, and that is stated above. This is a man made computer and that’s that. How ever godly man gets it’s still determined on if the hate switch can be shut off in time.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  I wonder what was DALL-E input for the cover image?