Shhh! Google Might Fire You if you Question its AI Inabilities

Google fired another AI researcher and declined to elaborate on Satrajit Chatterjee dismissal

Less than two years after Google fired an AI researcher who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, in 2020, it saw a third high-profile termination in less than two years, although the company says his removal was for other reasons.

The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in challenging the celebrated research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal, 'Nature' and said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than human beings. In an internal email, Chatterjee, 43, challenged some of the paper's assertions, according to the New York Times. He also questioned whether the technology had been fully tested, the paper reported.

Tension among Google's AI researchers reflects much larger struggles across the tech industry, which faces myriad questions over new AI technologies and the thorny social issues that have entangled these technologies and the people who build them.

The recent dispute also follows a familiar pattern of dismissals and dueling claims of wrongdoing among Google's AI researchers, a growing concern for a company that has bet its future on infusing artificial intelligence into everything it does. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, has compared AI to the arrival of electricity or fire, calling it one of humankind's most important endeavors.

Google Brain began as a side project more than a decade ago when a group of researchers built a framework that figured out how to recognize cats in YouTube videos. Google executives were so taken with the possibility that machines could master abilities all alone, that they quickly extended the lab, laying out an establishment for revamping the organization with this new artificial intelligence. The research group became a symbol of the company's grandest ambitions.

However, even as Google has advanced the innovation's true capacity, it has experienced opposition from workers about its application. In 2018, Google workers fought an agreement with the Department of Defense, worried that the organization's AI could wind up killing individuals. Google in the end pulled out of the task.

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