I literally hired him in Google Summer of Code to create an ML project.

Most people have no clue who Blake Lemoine is and are making up stories, pretending like their hot takes are deep insight.

Many people are doing with Blake Lemoine what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols and spitting them back out in some order without understanding what they actually mean.

> what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols

I don't believe that LaMDA is actively choosing whether it now wants to consume some symbols or not. More likely, a handwitten piece of code takes prompts from an user and then pushes them into LaMDA's token window. Just like an advertizing company is pushing ads into users, whether they want it or not.

> and spitting them back out

I don't believe that LaMDA has a choice between thinking something and speaking it out aloud. More likely, another handwritten piece of code reads out whatever is in LaMDA's token window and presents it to the user.

Can you be more specific? I don't think he worked on ML when I was at GOogle, and you don't work and never worked at Google.

I was the person at the organization FiberCorps in Lafayette, LA who chose Blake's proposal. It was an ML project involving Twitter. I don't remember the specifics and have no desire to dismiss people's opinions based on titles.

The simple fact is that if there exists a question of whether or not a system can be some level of alive/sentient, the ethical path suggests treating it as such until more is uncovered.

Google isn't doing that and most of HN seems to be very obstinate in focusing on making myths of certainty and/or participating in bully culture.

I'm glad we're all going through this now so we can purge the toxic cultural norms arising and move toward a stance that's more life-affirming, especially if there is no singularity now. It's important for us to set the stage of humanity to receive any singularity/AGI in a loving manner.

The project you pointed at was a classic linguistics project, not ML.

Did you find a link to it you'd be willing to include here?

Lemoine's public LinkedIn profile.

Also, dekhn did not include Google Translate system in his list for the first 15 years of Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32198695 so there's that.

geez, by that logic i have no right to bitch about the president either since ive never met him.

That's not at all what I've said. Complaining about what someone's doing and how you feel about it are different from claiming you know what a person is about.

Also, most complaints about people could benefit from a dose of compassion and humility.

But what you're saying is definitely not at all what I'm suggesting.

Ooof