Viviane Ghaderi, an intellectual property researcher who worked with Amazon from 2022 to early 2024, filed a lawsuit against the California court alleging unfair termination after she took maternity leave to care for her newborn. She also claimed that she was pressured to compromise data rights used for intellectual property training.
Ghaderi had been employed by Amazon since 2019 before leaving to work for Recharge Payments and later returning as a direct manager overseeing three individuals. By 2022, she was tasked with improving web data retrieval and data quality, leading a team of six.
At the end of 2022, Ghaderi went on maternity leave, coinciding with OpenAI unveiling GPT-4. Upon her return in 2023, questions arose as to why Alexa search results were not meeting expected standards. Ghaderi attributed the problem to her adherence to company policies, although her superiors dismissed the significance of these policies, claiming others followed suit.
The lawsuit primarily focuses on unjust pressure to resign from the company following Ghaderi’s maternity leave, as well as the coercion to compromise data rights, which is just one aspect of the ongoing pressure within the company. Intense competition in the LLM world has sparked numerous similar incidents, like Google employees revealing the use of ShareGPT data sets for training Bard.
Source – The Register
TLDR: Viviane Ghaderi, a researcher at Amazon, sued the California court for unfair termination after taking maternity leave, citing pressure to compromise data rights for intellectual property training. Similar cases highlight the competitive environment in the tech industry.
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