Google faces internal battle over research on AI to speed chip design

The dispute, which stems from efforts to automate chip design, threatens to undermine the reputation of Google's research in the academic community.

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Monday it had recently fired a senior engineering manager after colleagues, whose landmark research on artificial intelligence software he had been trying to discredit, accused him of harassing behaviour.

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The dispute, which stems from efforts to automate chip design, threatens to undermine the reputation of Google's research in the academic community. It also could disrupt the flow of millions of dollars in government grants for research into AI and chips.

Google's research unit has faced scrutiny since late 2020 after workers lodged open critiques about its handling of personnel complaints and publication practices.

The new episode emerged after the scientific journal Nature in June published "A graph placement methodology for fast chip design," led by Google scientists Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie. They discovered that AI could complete a key step in the designprocess for chips, known as floorplanning, faster and better than an unspecified human expert, a subjective reference point.

But other Google colleagues in a paper that was anonymously posted online in March - "Stronger Baselines for Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning in Chip Placement " - found that two alternative approaches based on basic software outperform the AI. One beat it on a well-known test, and the other on a proprietary Google rubric.

Google declined to comment on the leaked draft, but two workers confirmed its authenticity.