Google stated on Monday it had just lately fired a senior engineering supervisor after colleagues, whose landmark analysis on synthetic intelligence software program he had been making an attempt to discredit, accused him of harassing behaviour.
The dispute, which stems from efforts to automate chip design, threatens to undermine the popularity of Google’s analysis within the tutorial group. It additionally may disrupt the circulate of tens of millions of {dollars} in authorities grants for analysis into AI and chips.
Google’s analysis unit has confronted scrutiny since late 2020 after employees lodged open critiques about its dealing with of personnel complaints and publication practices.
The new episode emerged after the scientific journal Nature in June revealed “A graph placement methodology for fast chip design,” led by Google scientists Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie. They found that AI may full a key step within the design course of for chips, referred to as floorplanning, quicker and higher than an unspecified human professional, a subjective reference level.
But different Google colleagues in a paper that was anonymously posted on-line in March — “Stronger Baselines for Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning in Chip Placement” — discovered that two various approaches based mostly on fundamental software program outperform the AI. One beat it on a widely known check, and the opposite on a proprietary Google rubric.
Google declined to touch upon the leaked draft, however two employees confirmed its authenticity.
The firm stated it refused to publish Stronger Baselines as a result of it didn’t meet its requirements, and shortly after fired Satrajit Chatterjee, a number one driver of the work. It declined to say why it fired him.
“It’s unfortunate that Google has taken this turn,” stated Laurie Burgess, an lawyer for Chatterjee. “It was always his goal to have transparency about the science, and he urged over the course of two years for Google to address this.”
Google researcher Goldie advised the New York Times, which on Monday first reported the firing, that Chatterjee had harassed her and Mirhoseini for years by spreading misinformation about them.
Burgess denied the allegations and added that Chatterjee didn’t leak Stronger Baselines.
Patrick Madden, an affiliate professor centered on chip design at Binghamton University who has learn each papers, stated he had by no means seen a paper earlier than the one in Nature that lacked a great comparability level.
“It’s like a reference problem: Everyone gets the same jigsaw puzzle pieces, and you can compare how close you come to getting everything right,” he stated. “If they were to produce results on some standard benchmark and they were stellar, I would sing their praises.”
Google stated the comparability to a human was extra related and that software program licensing points had prevented it from mentioning exams.
Studies by large establishments equivalent to Google in well-known journals can have an outsized affect on whether or not comparable initiatives are funded within the trade. One Google researcher stated the leaked paper had unfairly opened the door to questions concerning the credibility of any work revealed by the corporate.
After “Stronger Baselines” emerged on-line, Zoubin Ghahramani, a vice chairman at Google Research, wrote on Twitter final month that “Google stands by this work published in Nature on ML for Chip Design, which has been independently replicated, open-sourced, and used in production at Google.”
Nature, citing a UK public vacation, didn’t have instant remark. Madden stated he hoped Nature would revisit the publication, noting that peer reviewer notes present a minimum of one requested for outcomes on benchmarks.
“Somehow, that never happened,” he stated.
© Thomson Reuters 2022
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