They probably felt that they had 'scholastic freedom' and they generally do. But if your job is 'AI Research' and you publish a piece about how much electricit

They probably felt that they had 'scholastic freedom' and they generally do. But if your job is 'AI Research' and you publish a piece about how much electricity Google uses to 'train models' ... well, you can expect scrutiny. In this case, the researcher was simply asked to hold the paper until more information was included about the fact that Google has actually improved certain paramaters quite a lot since the time the data was referenced in the report. This is extremely fair from Google. If the research was purely concerning some AI results, even how they could be unjust - fine. But as soon as your research specifically includes the sponsor, then it's perfectly fair for the sponsor to add more information. It's not censorship, in that case, it's frankly the opposite. The 'miscommunication' here is a kind of naive thinking by researchers who probably have never had normal jobs, who have never worn a 'company hat' and may not have any internalized understanding for communications. For many researchers - money comes from magical taxpayer funds, and the 'Uni Model' is the only model they understand and some might think that's how the world ought to be. If Google was giving people cancer due to the tar in their products, the researchers were discovering this - and Google was trying to suppress this, then you'd have a serious problem. This is not Marlborough/Cargill/Exxon, it's Google and it's an entirely different situation. The 'hammers' used by the social justice fronts from the 1960s just don't work anymore, because we have made progress and nothing is obvious.