Just to preemptively put this out there, based on the conspiracy theories I saw in previous threads about this, they didn't fire him because they want to keep their super intelligent AI under wraps, they fired him because he broke employment and data security policies:
> So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.
Just to add some more details - I believe he reached out to people in congress, and obviously people in the media as well. So it's pretty clear to me Google was entirely justified in this decision, even if there were other PR-related reasons for it.
> So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.