I'm interested to know too. Because although I treat my ML work professionally, I haven't worked at a large AI lab. So I had no idea whether academic review was common inside DeepMind/OpenAI/Facebook AI, or whether researchers generally did their own thing -- i.e. that the researcher and their co-authors are the main judges of their own academic integrity.
And in hindsight, it seems dumb to think it'd be any other way. Of course the researchers are their own judge. That's what the reviewers are for! You submit your paper for academic review at a journal, and the reviewers are in charge of reviewing.
Would you really want to mess with that dynamic if you're a big company? It's been a tried-and-true way to do science for more than a century. It's also a recipe for failing at science, as many will attest. But being allowed to fail at science is a key aspect of science. It would be terrible if we only published papers that were completely correct in every detail, because it means everyone is playing it safe rather than pushing the boundaries. The most interesting work is usually on the frontier of some new idea.
When the news broke, I didn't give it a second thought. "Oh, Jeff is saying that there's an academic review process. Yeah, obviously DeepMind would have something like that. And what's this -- she sent the paper one day before the journal deadline? That's almost giving them the middle finger. Yeah, pretty clear-cut firing."
... But when you think back on it, none of that adds up. Researchers are paid to do research. Being hamstrung by some manager insisting that you namedrop every relevant paper from the last decade would certainly be rigorous, but not necessarily productive. Sure, you can argue that maybe she should have talked about X or Y. But you could also write your own paper.
I'll admit, I didn't think highly of her. All I knew was that she liked to stir up drama. Why won't she just keep quiet and do her job like everyone else? Yet now it seems like she was doing her job. And if I ask myself how I'd react in that situation -- some middle manager is forcing a bogus new "review" process, and now they're demanding us to retract a paper that we put several months of work into, for reasons other than "You're revealing Google's IP," then my thoughts would be: (a) where were you during the two months I've been writing this and asking for feedback? (b) what are you trying to accomplish here, and is this really how a world-class institution treats the process?
Every company is different. And at Google scale, different teams are different. But now it's looking pretty bad. They certainly had grounds to fire her, and for many folks perhaps that's enough, but as a researcher I'm thinking "Why did Google try so hard to retract her paper anyway?" They keep dancing around that. And the article certainly doesn't address it:
Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication.
Why? That's the point of publishing! Do reviewers just say "Oh this is from Google" and click the "approve" button? Maybe, but the whole point is for people to read a paper and decide for themselves whether it's mistaken. This whole "keep it under the rug until it's polished perfectly for six months for no reason other than prestige" is... well, rather a grim-sounding idea.
Outsiders can't know what insiders know. But we can picture various things based on the information we're getting. And this reads like some manager tried to double down, and she called him on it each time. After four or five doublings, now it's headline news and Google is looking like they went nuclear without some very solid reasons.