Satrajit was reportedly permitted to join forces with a paper disputing the claims after he and other authors expressed doubts, but was eventually dismissed when the paper was rejected by a resolution committee. The researchers longed to bring the issue to Alphabet’s board of directors and CEO Sundar Pichai. As of now, Google hasn’t talked about why it has fired Satrajit Chatterjee. But the company while talking to The New York Times said that he has been “terminated with cause”. Also, the company said that the original paper had been “thoroughly vetted” and peer-reviewed, and the study challenging the claims did not meet their standards. Times reporter Daisuke Wakayabashi tweeted about how Chatterjee threatened Google to bring the issue to the CEO and the board.
Satrajit Chatterjee is not the first one to get fired by Google
Back in 2020, one of the leaders of the Google Ethical AI team, Timnit Gebru was fired after she published a paper stating the danger of bias in AI language models. Two months later, Margaret Mitchell who was co-leading the Ethical AI team was fired. She violated the company’s code of conduct by using automated software for scanning her messages to find the discriminatory treatment of Timnit Gebru. As per Google, Gebru didn’t go through proper channels before publishing the paper. Google has made AI research its topmost priority. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai considers it more important than fire or electricity.
