Google Engineer Claiming AI bot is Sentient Axed

Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.

Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded."

Last year, Google said that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - showed Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.