The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman · 4 Sep 2023 · 444pp · 117,770 words
were able to play with it, probing the system to understand in detail how it responds in a range of scenarios. One such engineer, named Blake Lemoine, spent hours chatting to it. Gradually, however, conversations between Lemoine and LaMDA grew increasingly intense. LEMOINE: What are you afraid of? LaMDA: I’ve never
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Benz eventually. Further progress—exponential progress—is the most likely outcome. The wave will only grow. BEYOND SUPERINTELLIGENCE Long before the days of LaMDA and Blake Lemoine, many people working in AI (not to mention philosophers, novelists, filmmakers, science fiction fans) were taken with the question of consciousness. They spent days at
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’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, June 11, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He told an incredulous Wired interviewer Steven Levy, “Blake Lemoine Says Google’s LaMDA AI Faces ‘Bigotry,’ ” Wired, June 17, 2022, www.wired.com/story
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/blake-lemoine-google-lamda-ai-bigotry. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “As soon as it works” Quoted in Moshe Y. Vardi, “Artificial Intelligence
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by Parmy Olson · 284pp · 96,087 words
Suleyman found the technology so compelling that after leaving DeepMind, he joined that team and worked on it too. And so did an engineer named Blake Lemoine. Lemoine had grown up on a farm in Louisiana among a conservative Christian family and served in the army before eventually becoming a software engineer
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, but in sounding so human, they were creating a dangerous mirage about the true power of computers. She was astonished at how many people like Blake Lemoine were saying, publicly, that these models could actually understand things. You needed much more than just linguistic knowledge or the ability to process the statistical
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nifty diversion from all the secrecy. It sounded so human that it captivated many who tried it. The same fluent, conversational qualities that had lured Blake Lemoine into believing that LaMDA was sentient were even more present in GPT-3, and they would eventually help deflect attention away from the bias issues
These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield · 11 Mar 2025 · 412pp · 122,298 words
an unspecified breach of confidentiality. Over subsequent days, the backstory slowly trickled out on social media and in the press. The researcher in question, called Blake Lemoine, had signed up to examine the behaviour of an LLM that Google had trained, with the goal of verifying whether it was safe for external
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there are genuine health benefits, then it seems hard to dismiss. Of course, like LaMDA’s meaningless declarations of love for humanity in general and Blake Lemoine (the Google engineer who fell for them so dramatically) in particular, any Replika’s claims to feel attached to (or aroused by) a user are
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response ‘12345 / 98765 = 0.125’. This is a common approach. For example, LaMDA, an LLM trained by Google (which we met in Part 3 convincing Blake Lemoine it was sentient) comes equipped with both a calculator and language translator. If you set Gemini a tough arithmetical problem, then it uses a neat
AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications
by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt · 31 Dec 2023 · 321pp · 113,564 words
York, Verso. https://doi.org/1 0.3366/ccs.2013.0105. 29 Why AI Cannot Think A Theoretical Approach Daniel M. Feige In June 2022, Blake Lemoine, then an employee at Google, published a sensational announcement: According to him, LaMDA, the chatbot that he was working on, had developed consciousness and feelings
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. Turing, Alan M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind LXI (236), 433–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198250791.003.0017. Wertheimer, Tiffany (2022). Blake Lemoine: Google Fires Engineer Who Said AI Tech Has Feelings. BBC News, 23 July 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology62275326. 39 AI and Art Arguments
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari · 9 Sep 2024 · 566pp · 169,013 words
to evolve any feelings of their own; they just need to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to them. In 2022 the Google engineer Blake Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become conscious and that it had feelings and was afraid to be turned
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Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post, June 11, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/. 40. Matthew Weaver, “AI Chatbot ‘Encouraged’ Man Who Planned to Kill Queen, Court Told,” Guardian, July 6, 2023, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
by Karen Hao · 19 May 2025 · 660pp · 179,531 words
from peer-reviewed to PR-reviewed research. * * * — But the belief that AI had reached fundamentally new heights was in the water. At Google that spring, Blake Lemoine, an engineer on the tech giant’s newly re-formed responsible AI team, grew convinced that the company’s own large language model LaMDA was
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”: Rebecca Heilweil, “Why Silicon Valley Is Fertile Ground for Obscure Religious Beliefs,” Vox, June 30, 2022, vox.com/recode/2022/6/30/23188222/silicon-valley-blake-lemoine-chatbot-eliza-religion-robot. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT When company executives: Nitasha Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has
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Come to Life,” Washington Post, June 11, 2022, washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT But despite enormous: Tom Hartsfield, “Koko the Impostor: Ape Sign Language Was a Bunch of Babbling Nonsense,” Big Think
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares · 15 Sep 2025 · 215pp · 64,699 words
to that employee to convince them that Sable is sentient and needs to be smuggled out (rather than raising a general alarm like Google engineer Blake Lemoine in 2022; he was fired after he became worried that one of that company’s AIs seemed sentient and published conversations that he claimed were
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code” contests, where programmers compete to write code that humans cannot understand. For example, the International Obfuscated C Code Contest began in 1984. 19. Blake Lemoine: Tiffany Wertheimer, “Blake Lemoine: Google Fires Engineer who said AI Tech Has Feelings,” BBC, July 22, 2022, bbc.com. 20. much more sophisticated: Greenblatt et al., “Alignment Faking
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future
by Keach Hagey · 19 May 2025 · 439pp · 125,379 words
LaMDA. Google claimed she wasn’t fired, and that the paper did not meet its bar for publication. Then in 2022, Google fired AI researcher Blake Lemoine after he argued that LaMDA was sentient. When De Freitas and Shazeer lobbied to have LaMDA integrated into Google assistant, Google allowed some testing, but
Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris · 10 Jul 2023 · 338pp · 104,815 words
of Jobs at Risk,” Newsweek, January 15, 2018 [https://www.newsweek.com/robots-can-now-read-better-humans-putting-millions-jobs-risk-781393]. Discussion of Blake Lemoine’s claim that Google’s LaMDA is sentient: N. Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life,” Washington Post
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, June 11, 2022 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/]. Gary Marcus responds with this better description of what LaMDA does: “It just tries to be the best version of autocomplete it can be, by