Google misplaced a bid to dismiss a lawsuit by an engineer who claims he was fired for difficult a paper the corporate revealed that touted the power of synthetic intelligence to hurry the design of pc chips.
In a tentative ruling Wednesday, a California state decide rejected the Alphabet Inc. unit’s request to throw out Satrajit Chatterjee’s wrongful termination and whistleblower safety claims. Chatterjee is a minimum of the third researcher to be ousted by Google after butting heads with the corporate over using AI.
Earlier than Chatterjee was fired in March 2022, he was a senior engineering supervisor whose obligations included evaluating a chip design initiative referred to as Venture Morpheus.
His dispute with Google adopted its publication of a scientific paper within the journal Nature in April 2020 which claimed the corporate’s AI packages might design pc chips quicker than people.
Chatterjee and his workforce performed additional analysis which he claims satisfied him that Google’s paper misrepresented the power of the corporate’s proprietary know-how.
After presenting his findings to Google supervisors, he was fired “as a result of he allegedly threatened to reveal his suspicions of fraud to the CEO and the board,” in response to the courtroom’s abstract of the grievance.
In his ruling, Superior Court docket Decide Frederick Chung in San Jose mentioned Chatterjee adequately supported his declare that Google terminated him in retaliation for refusing to take part in an act that will violate state or federal legislation.
Google argued that Chatterjee’s allegations and stories of fraud are educational disputes and “a disagreement between scientists over the higher option to design pc chips,” rendering them an inner matter.
“This argument presupposes, nonetheless, that inner personnel issues and disclosures of suspected or precise illegal conduct are all the time mutually unique,” Chung wrote.
Chatterjee claims that Google, by hyping its AI analysis, was trying to defraud shareholders and the general public.
The courtroom’s web site signifies that Google can contest the tentative ruling at a listening to Thursday earlier than the decide points a last choice. Google beforehand received dismissal of different claims within the case.
Google did not reply exterior common enterprise hours to a request for remark.
The case is Chatterjee v. Google LLC, 22CV398683, California Superior Court docket, Santa Clara County (San Jose).
