Google fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of AI used in manufacturing computer chips, making it the third researcher fired after critiquing the company's AI, The New York Times reported May 2.
The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, PhD, led a team of researchers who challenged a research paper by the company published April 13, 2021, in Nature. The paper claimed that computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than human beings.
Dr. Chatterjee had expressed concerns about the paper in an internal email. He questioned some of the paper's claims and whether the technology had been rigorously tested.
Google allowed Dr. Chatterjee and a handful of internal and external researchers to work on a paper that challenged some of the original paper's claims. The team submitted the rebuttal paper to a resolution committee for publication approval, but the paper was rejected.
Dr. Chatterjee was fired in March.
Four people close to the matter told The New York Times that the move came shortly after the company told his team that it would not publish their paper, which rebutted some claims from the original.
Google said it stands by its original paper.
"We thoroughly vetted the original Nature paper and stand by the peer-reviewed results," said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president at Google Research. "We also rigorously investigated the technical claims of a subsequent submission, and it did not meet our standards for publication."
Google Brain, the company's AI research group, struggled with a variety of complaints about how it builds, uses and portrays those technologies.
In 2018, Google employees protested a contract with the Department of Defense, concerned that the company's AI could end up killing people. Google pulled out of the project.
In December 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, PhD, one of the leaders of its Ethical AI team, for criticizing the company's approach to minority hiring. She also pushed to publish a research paper that pointed out flaws in a new type of AI system for learning languages.
A few months later, another leader of its Ethical AI team, Margaret Mitchell, PhD, was fired after publicly denouncing Google's handling of the situation with Dr. Gebru.
Google said she violated its code of conduct.