AI meets human challenges

Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticised the biases built into AI systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialised type of AI used in making computer chips.

Satrajit Chatterjee, 43, led a team of scientists in challenging the paper that appeared in Nature and said computers were able to design parts of a computer chip faster and better than humans.

Chatterjee was fired in March, after Google said it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in the Nature article, said four people familiar with the situation. Google confirmed that Chatterjee had been “terminated with cause”.