Is Google's AI research about to implode?

What does Timnit Gebru's firing and the recent papers coming out of Google tell us about the state of research at the world's biggest AI research department. The high point for Google's research in to Artifical Intelligence may well turn out to be the 19th of October 2017. This was the date that David Silver and his co-workers at DeepMind published a report, in the journal Nature, showing how their deep-learning algorithm AlphaGo Zero was a better Go player than not only the best human in the world, but all other Go-playing computers. What was most remarkable about AlphaGo Zero was that it worked without human assistance. The researchers set up a neural network, let it play lots of games of Go against itself and a few days later it was the best Go player in the world. Then they showed it chess and it took only four hours to become the best chess player in the world.