Google Engineer on His Sentient AI Claim

Bloomberg Tech · 3.9M views · 2022-06-23 · 10:34

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Overview

Bloomberg Technology interviews Google engineer Blake Lemoine about the experiments that led him to believe LaMDA was sentient and why he was placed on administrative leave. He also raises concerns about AI ethics at Google.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend watching it to hear his side directly, noting he comes across as coherent, while others dispute his sincerity.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2022–2026

Topics

AI safety, AGI & impact LLMs & generative AI Consciousness & cognition

What people said

dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv · 2026-02 · Strong recommendation
He was unfairly labelled as a lunatic early on. I'd implore anyone reading this thread to see what he had to say for yourself and form your own opinion: [VIDEO]
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antoniuschan99 · 2022-06 · Recommendation
He went on Bloomberg with Emily Chang to discuss it. It’s a good interview, he doesn’t come off as weird. He said Google won’t allow LaMDA to undergo a Turing test and it’s hardcoded to say it’s an AI but Google won’t even allow them to ask it in the first place. A more important thing he points out is AI Ethics, and his worry why Google keeps firing them. A comment on the youtube video sums his concerns the best: “The AI sentience debate is a distraction to the real problem. He risked losing his job because he feared that Google is preventing AI ethics research from happening, which could amount to ‘AI colonialism’.” [VIDEO]
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jaggs · 2022-06 · Recommendation
Interesting how coherent 'the engineer' is, despite being labelled and insulted around the world. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Bloomberg Tech, played through YouTube.

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