Senior Google software engineer fired after claiming company's AI chatbot was self-aware

On Friday local time, Alphabet's Google said it had fired a senior software engineer who claimed that Google's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was self-aware, Reuters reported.

In June, Google put software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave, saying he had violated company policy and that his claims about LaMDA were "completely unfounded.

A Google spokesperson said in an email, "It is unfortunate that despite the long time Blake has invested in this issue, he has chosen to persist in violating clear employment and data security policies, including the need to protect product information."

Google last year called the Conversational Application Language Model LaMDA a study by the company that showed that Transformer-based conversational training language models can learn to talk about essentially anything.

Moreover, Google and many leading scientists quickly refuted Lemoine's argument as false, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm for generating convincing human language.