Ex-Google engineer warns Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing chatbot could be sentient

 A former Google engineer fired by the company last year after claiming the company had developed a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) now believes Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot may have also gained sentience. Lemoine gained prominence last June when he went to the press to warn that Google’s language model program, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications, has gained sentience. He was immediately fired for his claims, with Google claiming that the former engineer was merely anthropomorphizing an “impressive” program. 

In his opinion piece, Lemoine warned that AI is a “very powerful technology” that has not been sufficiently tested and is not properly understood, even by its developers. If AI were to be deployed on a large scale, such as what Microsoft plans to do with its Bing chatbot, it would play a critical role in the dissemination of information and could lead to many people being led astray.

“People are going to Google and Bing to try and learn about the world. And now, instead of having indexes curated by humans, we’re talking to artificial people,” wrote Lemoine. “I believe we do not understand these artificial people we’ve created well enough yet to put them in such a critical role.”...<<<Read More>>>...