IIn a strange way, the best thing that could have happened to Google (now disguised as Alphabet, its parent company) was Facebook. Why? Because although Google invented surveillance capitalismArguably the most toxic business model since the opium trade, it was Facebook that got in the most trouble for its abuses. The result was that Google enjoyed an easier journey. Naturally, he had a bit of a run-in with the EU, with pesky fines and protracted legal wrangling. But it was Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, not Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin and his adult supervisor Eric Schmidt, who was given the title of evil emperor of the online world.
This sometimes allowed Google to fly under the regulatory radar and avoid public criticism. His relative immunity may also have been fostered by the credulity induced by his “Do not be evil” motto. What may also have helped is the way in which, over the years, messed up a lot of things – Google+, Google Wave, Google Glass, Knol and Google Reader, to name just five. On the other hand, he also managed to create useful and successful products: Gmail, for example, as well as Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google Earth and Google Books. And, of course, he made inspiring acquisitions of YouTube in 2006 and AI startup DeepMind in 2014.
What allowed the company to get away with that mix of creativity, clumsiness, and indirection, obviously, was that it was always rolling in money. Its powerful search engine cash pump and associated advertising business has reliably provided revenue of more than $100 billion a year since 2017 for the enrichment of its shareholders. With that kind of income, you can afford to make a lot of mistakes, especially when you own the search engine that has a near monopoly on the market in most of the non-communist world.
So how come this lucrative giant suddenly finds itself in panic stations? Sundar Pichai, its chief executive, has issued a “code red” alert, whatever that means. seems to imply remembering the two co-founders of the company, who had happily been spending time with their vast fortunes, to help right the ship. It also means laying people off on an industrial scale: 12,000 to date. The methods involved in the firings are not as brutal as those employed by Elon Musk on Twitter, but the scale is real enough. An executive reported that the first hint that something was up came when he couldn’t access his Google Nest Hub smart home control. “When I went to check my work email,” he wrote, “I was still awake and couldn’t figure out why I was getting so many emails asking if I was okay. Scrolling further down, there was an email form from PeopleOps stating, as you may have guessed, that my employment with Google has been terminated.”
Why the panic? Three reasons, in ascending order of urgency. The first is that the tech industry knows a recession is coming and that it massively overhired during 2021 and 2022. To date, the major companies have laid off about 200,000 employees. Second, the US Department of Justice and eight states filed a lawsuit against Google alleging that it illegally monopolized the online advertising market through, according to Politico’s website, a “year-long practice of self-dealing, anticompetitive and force companies to use multiple products and services that it offers”.
But the real reason for the panic seems to be San Francisco-based company OpenAI’s prototype artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, whose free version is taking the world by storm. This is already worrying enough for Google, given that people are already using it as a sort of search engine. But perhaps what alarms Pichai and company is that OpenAI is testing the market for a “pro” version that costs $42 per month and providing faster responses and other benefits. And that the company is heavily backed by Microsoft.
With Google (and therefore Alphabet) critically dependent on the continued prosperity of Google Search, anything that could undermine it will seem like an existential threat. And we know that, in the technology industry, former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s mantra that “only the paranoid survive” is conventional wisdom. But even so, it’s hard to see why Pichai and his colleagues are so concerned. After all, it’s not like they go into battle naked. Google has its own version of a system similar to ChatGPT: LaMDA (language model for dialog applications) – which, famously, one engineer found so convincing that he began to believe it might be sensible (and was later fired for going public with his views).
Given all this, why isn’t Google launching LaMDA? Is it because the company feels that it is not yet ready for a wide rollout? Maybe it’s still being investigated, how ChatGPT is, due to its ability to generate toxic content? Or is it because, in light of the latest antitrust lawsuit, the company is worried about regulators? Who knows? It’s almost enough to make one want to ask ChatGPT: “Why doesn’t Google launch a chatbot like you?”
what i’ve been reading
count blow by blow
The UK is wasting a lot of wind energy is a long and sobering blog post by Archy de Berker about the dysfunctional way the country’s energy market and grid planning works.
desktop publishing
Last week the Ars Technica website had an interesting essay by Jeremy Reimer called Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years latermarking the 40th anniversary of the forerunner of the Macintosh.
edited highlight
The culture wars look different on Wikipedia he is very thoughtful Atlantic Noam Cohen’s piece on how online encyclopedia editing works.
