"Google fired machine learning scientist Satrajit Chatterjee in March, soon after it refused to publish a paper Chatterjee and others wrote challenging earlier findings that computers could design some chip components more effectively than humans. The scientist was reportedly allowed to collaborate on a paper disputing those claims after he and fellow authors expressed reservations, but was dismissed after a resolution committee rejected the paper and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors."
Google refused to allow a paper that was critical of a previous paper to be published? That would be scientific misconduct at the organization level, no? The kind of thing that got the Trump administration in trouble, right?
It is a strange hill to decide to die on. Even if you are the expert in the area, AI is weird and changing the world.
Most Nature papers have something wrong with them. I don't see any reason that reinforcement learning cannot learn the best layouts or what not. I don't know the space though enough to say more than that.
The NYTimes article alleges that he waged a misinformation campaign against two researchers. So there's that in the mix as well.
They can fire him for whatever reason they like, but preventing the publication of a paper should not be a corporate policy decision. The only question they should ask is if it reveals trade secrets, which I assume it wouldn't because it was a response to another paper from Google. The whole scientific process thing is the part intended to decide if it's meaningful or not.
That AI is weird and changing the world is why the science shouldn't be held up on the question of whether it embarrasses the company.
Google refused to allow a paper that was critical of a previous paper to be published? That would be scientific misconduct at the organization level, no? The kind of thing that got the Trump administration in trouble, right?