( Bloomberg)– Google lost a shot to dismiss an action by a mastermind who claims he was fired for challenging a paper the company published that touted the capability of artificial intelligence to speed the design of computer chips.
In a conditional ruling Wednesday, a California state judge rejected the AlphabetInc. unit’s request to throw out Satrajit Chatterjee’s unlawful termination and whistleblower protection claims. Chatterjee is at least the third experimenter to be ousted by Google after butting heads with the company over the use of AI.
Before Chatterjee was fired in March 2022, he was an elderly engineering director whose liabilities included assessing a chip design action called Project Morpheus.
His disagreement with Google followed its publication of a scientific paper in the journal Nature in April 2020 which claimed the company’s AI programs could design computer chips more briskly than humans.
Chatterjee and his platoon conducted further exploration which he claims convinced him that Google’s paper misrepresented the capability of the company’s personal technology.
After presenting his findings to Google administrators, he was fired “ because he allegedly hovered to expose his reservations of fraud to the CEO and the board, ” according to the court’s summary of the complaint.
In his ruling, Superior Court Judge Frederick Chung in San Jose said Chatterjee adequately supported his claim that Google terminated him in retribution for refusing to share in an act that would violate state or civil law.
Google argued that Chatterjee’s allegations and reports of fraud are academic controversies and “ a disagreement between scientists over the better way to design computer chips, ” rendering them an internal matter.
“ This argument presupposes, still, that internal labor force matters and exposures of suspected or factual unlawful conduct are always mutually exclusive, ” Chung wrote.
Chatterjee claims that Google, by hyping its AI exploration, was trying to defraud shareholders and the public.
The court’s website indicates that Google can dispute the conditional ruling at a hail Thursday before the judge issues a final decision. Google preliminarily won redundancy
of other claims in the case.
Google didn’t respond outdoors regular business hours to a request for comment.
The case is Chatterjee. Google LLC, 22CV398683, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County( San Jose).
