Google has fired a researcher who questioned a report it published on the skills of a particular sort of artificial intelligence used in computer chips, less than two years after dismissing two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems.
Satrajit Chatterjee, the researcher, led a team of academics in contesting the famed research study, which was published last year in the scientific magazine Nature and claimed that computers could design specific elements of a computer chip faster and better than humans.
Chatterjee, 43, was sacked in March, shortly after Google informed his team that it would not publish a paper that refuted some of the assertions made in Nature, according to four people familiar with the case who was not authorized to talk publicly about it. In a written statement, Google stated that Chatterjee had been “terminated with cause.”
Google declined to comment on Chatterjee’s dismissal, but it issued a vehement defense of the research he criticized, as well as its refusal to publish his review.
“We thoroughly vetted the original Nature paper and stand by the peer-reviewed results,” Google Research vice president Zoubin Ghahramani said in a written statement. “We also rigorously investigated the technical claims of a subsequent submission, and it did not meet our standards for publication.”
Chatterjee’s departure was the latest sign of strife within and around Google Brain, an AI research group regarded as critical to the company’s future.
Tension among Google’s AI researchers parallels far broader struggles in the tech industry, which is grappling with a slew of questions about new AI technologies and the thorny societal issues that have enmeshed these systems and the people who build them.
The latest fight also follows a similar pattern of dismissals and competing allegations of malfeasance among Google’s AI researchers, a rising source of anxiety for a corporation that has staked its future on incorporating artificial intelligence into everything it does.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has compared artificial intelligence (AI) to the emergence of electricity or fire, calling it one of humanity’s most essential achievements.
More than a decade ago, a group of researchers created a system that learned to detect cats in YouTube videos as a side project. Google officials were so excited about the potential of robots learning skills on their own that they quickly expanded the lab, laying the groundwork for redesigning the corporation with this new artificial intelligence. The research team became a symbol of the company’s loftiest goals.
Even as Google has pushed the technology’s potential, it has experienced staff pushback to its use. Employees at Google opposed a deal with the Department of Defense in 2018, afraid that the company’s AI could wind up murdering people. Google eventually withdrew from the initiative.
