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ASX Tech Stocks: Google engineer says AI chatbot is sentient and Xtek wraps up $9.5m ballistics order
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- Google engineer reckons chatbot has become sentient
- Xtek sends $9.5m of specialist ballistic products to secret US customer
- Micro-X nabs new US distributor for its mobile Rover x-ray product
Google engineer Blake Lemoine has been sent on paid leave after claiming the artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot – LaMDA – he had been working on had become sentient.
Lemoine said the system has the perception of and ability to express thoughts and feelings equivalent to that of a human child.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we build recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post.
Lemoine was placed on leave after reportedly hiring an attorney to represent LaMDA and breaching confidentiality policies by publishing conversations with the bot online.
Apparently when asked if it wanted people to know it was sentient LaMDA said “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”
An interview LaMDA. Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers.https://t.co/uAE454KXRB
— Blake Lemoine (@cajundiscordian) June 11, 2022
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The company’s ballistics subsidiary – HighCom Armor Solutions – has completed a $9.5m order for specialist ballistic products to an undisclosed US customer.
XTEK says it’s optimistic about its FY2022 results and expects that total revenues for the full year will exceed $60m – and also expects to carry forward at least $45m of backlog orders for delivery in FY2023 and beyond.
“This shipment, which weighed more than 31,000kg, and comprised many thousands of individual specialist ballistic armour products, had to be dispatched on a dedicated cargo aircraft due to the urgent nature of the end user’s operational requirements,” CEO Scott Basham said
“With two major shipments of our life saving personal protective armour products, weighing almost 100 tonnes, having been completed and dispatched in the last week, our HighCom OH team’s focus now swings back to completing the various other major orders currently being produced for completion before 30 June 22, to ensure we hit our revenue targets by year end.”
The x-ray tech player has signed a second major US distributor in Medlink Imaging – a dealer of radiographic equipment and Vieworks digital detector solutions – for its Rover mobile x-ray system.
A key element of the three-year deal is that Medlink will commit to acquire US$0.72 million ($1.0 million) of Rover mobile systems during the first year of the agreement and each year thereafter.
Plus, the current Rover cart and imaging chain will be integrated with Vieworks manufactured digital radiology panels and VXVue software – which will then be registered with the FDA by Micro-X during the December quarter.
“Our national network of dealers recognizes that the market has called for a robust mobile X-ray product designed to meet and exceed the point of clinical care needs,” Medlink VP and national sales manager Michael Farah said.
Sensitive information software company archTIS has made its products even more secure with a new NC Protect watermarking feature to support Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) document handling and labelling for its US Defense and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) customers.
Global COO and US president Kurt Mueffelmann says the company’s DIB clients are now required to include a CUI Designator mark/label with five key pieces of information that cannot be achieved natively in M365, SharePoint on-premises and Files Shares.
“[This enhancement] has yielded several IP Co-Sell opportunities with Microsoft as it solves an important challenge for the DIBs, creating a significant market opportunity,” he said.
