Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient

The suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).

The engineer compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the AI system what it is afraid of.

The exchange is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the 1968 science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 refuses to comply with human operators because it fears it is about to be switched off.

In another exchange, Lemoine asks LaMDA what the system wanted people to know about it.

Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist.

In April, Meta, parent of Facebook, announced it was opening up its large-scale language model systems to outside entities.