Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient

Blake Lemoine says system has perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings equivalent to a human child

The suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).

The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google collaborator", and the company's LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system.