Maybe I can rephrase the title in a more objective way:
Google has lost some shine among people who wish to find bias and make an inflated political situation out of any act that happens to touch gender/race/class -- whether through the research itself, or the "meta" issues about whether someone was advanced/demoted/fired/hired for discussions about such topics. The company is decreasing its internal cultural desire to swing back and forth with every political movement and attract difficult attention that makes working there less productive.
For those researchers who aren't crusading to make an example out of a tech company, and who don't care to bring college-level activism and risk into their employment, it remains a fine place to work.
That doesn't mean knock-on effect won't be huge. The people most outraged about the Gebru situation are the ones running our cultural institutions, specifically academia and news/media industries. They naturally have the loudest voices in the room, meaning this will harm Google even if I believe they're in the right for a change.
They're probably increasing their reputation with an entirely different set of AI researchers who would have otherwise stayed away from Google for fear of being forced into a particular politically-driven agenda that they themselves may well not support. If even Hollywood has their share of closet conservatives, how many more must a purely mathematical discipline?
It's clear people who make these comments don't understand AI, ML and the deep subjects the field touches. There are deep questions about what learning and intelligence IS that these folks are trying to answer. Otherwise ML is just curve fitting and if you are satisfied with that that's fine but I'm not satisfied with curve fitting.
People who criticize the kind of work AI researches do in regards to ethics have a shallow knowledge of AI, ML and the field in general. But that's just my opinion.
Google has lost some shine among people who wish to find bias and make an inflated political situation out of any act that happens to touch gender/race/class -- whether through the research itself, or the "meta" issues about whether someone was advanced/demoted/fired/hired for discussions about such topics. The company is decreasing its internal cultural desire to swing back and forth with every political movement and attract difficult attention that makes working there less productive.
For those researchers who aren't crusading to make an example out of a tech company, and who don't care to bring college-level activism and risk into their employment, it remains a fine place to work.