Another Firing Among Google's A.I. Brain Trust, and More Discord

"We thoroughly vetted the original Nature paper and stand by the peer-reviewed results," Zoubin Ghahramani, a vice president at Google Research, said in a written statement. "We also rigorously investigated the technical claims of a subsequent submission, and it did not meet our standards for publication." Dr. Chatterjee's dismissal was the latest example of discord in and around Google Brain, an A.I. research group considered to be a key to the company's future. After spending billions of dollars to hire top researchers and create new kinds of computer automation, Google has struggled with a wide variety of complaints about how it builds, uses and portrays those technologies. Tension among Google's A.I. researchers reflects much larger struggles across the tech industry, which faces myriad questions over new A.I. technologies and the thorny social issues that have entangled these technologies and the people who build them.