Google fired another artificial intelligence researcher who questioned an article the company published in 2020. The company has laid off such an important name for the third time in the last two years.
Satrajit Chatterjee was fired in March after he and his team challenged a Google research paper about using artificial intelligence to make computer chips. The research paper published in Nature, a prestigious science journal, said that computers could design chip parts faster than humans.
Chatterjee, 43, disputed some of the article’s claims in an internal email, the Times reported. He also questioned in the article whether the technology has been fully tested.
Google defended the research article and its practices in a statement to the Times. “We’ve also scrutinized the technical claims of a later submission, and it didn’t meet our publication standards,” Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of Google Research, told the Times. ”
Chatterjee’s dismissal comes after two key figures within Google AI were fired. In December 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders of the Ethical AI team, after he published an article describing the dangers of bias in AI language models. Two months later, Margaret Mitchell, who assisted the Ethical AI team, was fired for violating the company’s code of conduct, which reportedly used automated software to scan her messages to find discriminatory behavior against Gebru.
Google said that Gebru published the article without going through the appropriate channels.
The search giant has made AI research central to the company’s reputation for innovation. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai thinks AI will be more important than electricity or fire. The company has integrated AI models into its core search product as a way to get users better results while reducing spam.
The Times reported that Google denied that Chatterjee and his team’s article refuted the original article.
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