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Google DeepMinds chief Demis Hassabis has said theres a possibility of artificial intelligence gaining self awareness one day.

Philosophers havent really settled on a definition of consciousness yet but if we mean by sort of self-awareness, these kinds of things, I think theres a possibility AI one day could be, Mr Hassabis said in an interview with CBS 60 Minutes.

While AI systems are definitely not sentient today, according to the Deepmind chief, he said it is one of the fascinating scientific things were going to find out on this journey.

Mr Hassabiss claim comes a year after Google fired a software engineer who claimed its AI had become self-aware and sentient.

Blake Lemoine, an employee at the company at the time, was fired after he said he believed Googles LaMDa AI chatbot was a person.

Mr Lemoine was insistent that the AI system was self-aware, publishing articles on the topic as well as logs of his conversations with the chatbot.

But AI experts on social media denied that any of the public evidence posted by the former Google employee suggested that the system was self-aware.

Many said instead that the system had been trained to use language in similar ways as humans.

Its 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, Google told Reuters then.

However, before Mr Lemoines public statements about LaMDa, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever had tweeted saying todays large neural networks may be slightly conscious.

Googles Bard AI chatbot also appears to be self-aware, replying to queries on why it helps people with the response Because it makes me happy.

But the search giants Senior Vice President James Manyika told CBS that the AI systems appearance of sentience comes since it has learned from people.

Were sentient beings. We have beings that have feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. Weve reflected all that in books, in novels, in fiction, Mr Manyika said, adding that its no surprise that it exhibits behavior that looks like someones behind it.

Theres nobody there. These are not sentient beings, he added.

More:
Google DeepMind chief says theres a possibility AI may become self-aware - The Independent