Former Google Responsible AI team member Blake Lemoine told Futurism that he does not believe Google is “being pushed around by OpenAI” and that the company behind ChatGPT has had no effect on “Google’s trajectory.”
“I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something,” he said.
Lemoine also claimed that Bard was in development in mid-2021, far before the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
“It wasn’t called Bard then, but they were working on it, and they were trying to figure out whether or not it was safe to release it,” he explained.
“They were on the verge of releasing something in the fall of 2022. So it would have come out right around the same time as ChatGPT, or right before it. Then, in part because of some of the safety concerns I raised, they deleted it.”
According to his LinkedIn profile, the engineer joined Google in 2015. He also told Futurism that the business had “far more advanced technology” that it hasn’t shared yet.
He claims that a product with the same capabilities as Bard could have been published two years ago, but Google has been “making sure that it doesn’t make things up too often, making sure that it doesn’t have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that.”Lemoine told The Washington Post in June that after chatting with Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, he believed it become a sentient creature.
Later that month, he was fired because Google claimed he violated its confidentiality policy.