ChatGPT, which some see as an eventual challenger to
Google's traditional search engine, seems doubly threatening given OpenAI's
close ties to Microsoft. The feeling that Google may be falling behind in an
area that it has considered a key strength has led to no small measure of
anxiety in Mountain View, California, according to current and former employees
as well as others close to the company, many of whom asked to remain anonymous
because they weren't allowed to speak publicly. As one current employee puts
it: “There is an unhealthy combination of abnormally high expectations and
great insecurity about any AI-related initiative.”
The effort has Pichai reliving his days as a product
manager, as he's taken to weighing in directly on the details of product features,
a task that would usually fall far below his pay grade, according to one former
employee. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have also gotten more
involved in the company than they've been in years, with Brin even submitting
code changes to Bard, Google's ChatGPT-esque chatbot. Senior management has
declared a “code red” that comes with a directive that all of its most
important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate
generative AI within months, according to a person with knowledge of the
matter. In an early example, the company announced in March that creators on
its YouTube video platform would soon be able to use the technology to
virtually swap outfits.
Some Google alumni have been reminded of the last time the company
implemented an internal mandate to infuse every key product with a new idea:
the effort beginning in 2011 to promote the ill-fated social network Google+.
It's not a perfect comparison—Google was never seen as a leader in social
networking, while its expertise in AI is undisputed. Still, there's a similar
feeling. Employee bonuses were once hitched to Google+'s success. Current and
former employees say at least some Googlers' ratings and reviews will likely be
influenced by their ability to integrate generative AI into their work. The
code red has already resulted in dozens of planned generative AI integrations.
“We're throwing spaghetti at the wall,” says one Google employee. “But it's not
even close to what's needed to transform the company and be competitive.”
In the end, the mobilization around Google+ failed. The
social network struggled to find traction with users, and Google ultimately
said in 2018 that it would shutter the product for consumers. One former Google
executive sees the flop as a cautionary tale. “The mandate from Larry was that
every product has to have a social component,” this person says. “It ended
quite poorly.”
A Google spokesperson pushes back against the comparison
between the code red and the Google+ campaign. While the Google+ mandate
touched all products, the current AI push has largely consisted of Googlers
being encouraged to test out the company's AI tools internally, the
spokesperson says: a common practice in tech nicknamed “dogfooding.” Most
Googlers haven't been pivoting to spend extra time on AI, only those working on
relevant projects, the spokesperson says.
Google is not alone in its conviction that AI is now
everything. Silicon Valley has entered a full-on hype cycle, with venture
capitalists and entrepreneurs suddenly proclaiming themselves AI visionaries,
pivoting away from recent fixations such as the blockchain, and companies
seeing their stock prices soar after announcing AI integrations. In recent
weeks, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been focused on AI rather than
the metaverse—a technology he recently declared so foundational to the company
that it required changing its name, according to two people familiar with the
matter.
The new marching orders are welcome news for some people at
Google, who are well aware of its history of diving into speculative research
only to stumble when it comes to commercializing it. Members of some teams
already working on generative AI projects are hopeful that they'll now be able
to “ship more and have more product sway, as opposed to just being some
research thing,” according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter.
In the long run, it may not matter much that OpenAI sucked
all the air out of the public conversation for a few months, given how much
work Google has already done. Pichai began referring to Google as an “AI-first”
company in 2016. It's used machine learning to drive its ad business for years
while also weaving AI into key consumer products such as Gmail and Google
Photos, where it uses the technology to help users compose emails and organize
images. In a recent analysis, research company Zeta Alpha examined the top 100
most cited AI research papers from 2020 to 2022 and found that Google dominated
the field. “The way it has ended up appearing is that Google was kind of the
sleeping giant who is behind and playing catch-up now. I think the reality is
actually not quite that,” says Amin Ahmad, a former AI researcher at Google who
co-founded Vectara, a startup that offers conversational search tools to
businesses. “Google was actually very good, I think, at applying this
technology into some of their core products years and years ahead of the rest
of the industry.”
Google has also wrestled with the tension between its
commercial priorities and the need to handle emerging technology responsibly.
There's a well-documented tendency of automated tools to reflect biases that
exist in the data sets they've been trained on, as well as concerns about the
implications of testing tools on the public before they're ready. Generative AI
in particular comes with risks that have kept Google from rushing to market. In
search, for instance, a chatbot could deliver a single answer that seems to
come straight from the company that made it, similar to the way ChatGPT appears
to be the voice of OpenAI. This is a fundamentally riskier proposition than
providing a list of links to other websites.
Google's code red seems to have scrambled its risk-reward
calculations in ways that concern some experts in the field. Emily Bender, a
professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, says
Google and other companies hopping onto the generative AI trend may not be able
to steer their AI products away “from the most egregious examples of bias, let
alone the pervasive but slightly subtler cases.” The spokesperson says Google's
efforts are governed by its AI principles, a set of guidelines announced in
2018 for developing the technology responsibly, adding that the company is
still taking a cautious approach.
Other outfits have already shown they're willing to push
ahead, whether Google does or not. One of the most important contributions
Google's researchers have made to the field was a landmark paper titled
“Attention Is All You Need,” in which the authors introduced transformers:
systems that help AI models zero in on the most important pieces of information
in the data they're analyzing. Transformers are now key building blocks for
large language models, the tech powering the current crop of chatbots—the “T”
in ChatGPT stands for “transformer.” Five years after the paper's publication,
all but one of the authors have left Google, with some citing a desire to break
free of the strictures of a large, slow-moving company.
They are among dozens of AI researchers who've jumped to
OpenAI as well as a host of smaller startups, including Character.AI, Anthropic
and Adept. A handful of startups founded by Google alumni—including Neeva,
Perplexity AI, Tonita and Vectara—are seeking to reimagine search using large
language models. The fact that only a few key places have the knowledge and
ability to build them makes the competition for that talent “much more intense
than in other fields where the ways of training models are not as specialized,”
says Sara Hooker, a Google Brain alumna now working at AI startup Cohere.
It's not unheard of for people or organizations to
contribute significantly to the development of one breakthrough technology or
another, only to see someone else realize stupefying financial gains without
them. Keval Desai, a former Googler who's now managing director of venture
capital firm Shakti, cites the example of Xerox Parc, the research lab that
laid the groundwork for much of the personal computing era, only to see Apple
Inc. and Microsoft come along and build their trillion-dollar empires on its
back. “Google wants to make sure that it's not the Xerox Parc of its era,” says
Desai. “All the innovation happened there, but none of the execution.” ©
Bloomberg
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