<div><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.</span><br></div><div><br></div><div>Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded."&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>"It's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information," a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.</div><div><br></div><div>Last year, Google said that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - was built on the company's research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.</div><div><br></div><div>Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.</div><div><br></div><div>Lemoine's dismissal was first reported by Big Technology, a tech and society newsletter. -Reuters</div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/TR</div>