Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says ‘broken’ Google Voice assistant proves that A.I. isn’t sentient

But Alphabet’s shift to A.I. has raised concerns about various aspects of the technology, from ongoing examples of racial bias in A.I. algorithms to fears of privacy violations caused by facial recognition.

And then there is Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee who caused a stir in June by claiming that the company’s A.I. chatbot technology had attained human-like sentience. In a blog post and in interviews with the media this summer, Lemoine said that Google’s LaMDA system for building chatbots (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications), had the ability to think and feel like a seven-to- nine-year old child.

Google put Lemoine on leave after he spoke out, and fired him in July for violating company security policies.

Asked about Lemoine’s claims on Tuesday, Pichai brushed off the notion of sentient or all-powerful A.I.

“I still think there’s a long way to go. I feel like I get into philosophical or metaphysical talks often about what is sentience and what is consciousness,” Pichai said. He said that human values are foundational to the company’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence, and that if done right, A.I. technology will be “empowering to humanity.”

Pichai said he was surprised by how big of a story the sentient A.I. incident turned into, acknowledging that it was a reflection of people’s concerns. But he said such worries were premature at best.

​​”We are far from it, and we may never get there,” Pichai said in regards to sentient A.I. He then pointed to one of Google’s own consumer chat products, Google Voice, to make his point. 

“The good news is that anyone who talks to Google Assistant – while I think it is the best assistant out there for conversational A.I. – you still see how broken it is in certain cases.”