A superb article in a substack account called Pirate Wires, Google’s Culture of Fear, which explains exactly what went wrong with the release of the Gemini AI, and is close to what I thought in the post, It’s not the AI, it’s the toxic minds driving it.

But I thought it was just the Gemini team. Turns out that it’s something more widespread in the company and it’s exactly the same problem faced by other companies as I described in DEI must DIE – shitty HR departments:

Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. 

Bingo. As such it may mean bigger problems for the huge company. How huge a company is Google?:

[Google] is an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers.

The bigger a corporation gets the harder it is to control, but although shareholders are now asking tough questions of CEO Sundar Pichai and the management in general, this was not a case of “out-of-control DEI-brained management” as revealed by interviews with many Google employees talking off-the-record:

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported
…
The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company’s craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google.”

The USSR had vast numbers of smart, talented scientists and engineers but their system also stuffed innovation. Closer in time and space it’s been noted that Apple’s stream of innovative products seems to have dried up since Steve Jobs died. Clearly the system and the culture in which smart, talented people work is at least as important as their skills – and both Google and Apple appear to be hitting walls, even as their past successes churn out vast amounts of profits, just as General Motors did in the 1950’s and 60’s. The following passage could be describing the business case studies of General Motors that I had to research in the 1980’s:

A strange kind of dance between Google’s Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length. 

No wonder HR has become the dominant force inside the company, so dominant that its strictures actually drove the architecture of the AI itself! Well of course they did: such an AI interacting with users could not be allowed to breach the precious rules of Diversity Inclusion and Equity. And those rules were already being enforced on the poor bloody humans who worked there:

…an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution.

It should therefore be no surprise to find that this is not the first Google failure – and that they’re starting to pile up:

  • They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web Servers) and Azure.
  • Google’s Moonshot Factory to combat X-Twitter, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake.
  • It lost Social Media (R.I.P. Google+).
  • It lost Augmented Reality (R.I.P. Glass).

So they have to win AI because the failure to deliver on that could strike at the heart of Google since that heart is being a search engine linked with advertising and AI could kill such search engines, just as search engines killed older forms of information seeking like phone books and the Yellow Pages. That’s why Google has been going after AI, to stay ahead of the competition. But because their business management is woeful and their business culture sucks, they actually screwed up right at the start when they trashed the DeepMind team that they purchased.

And judging from this latest debacle, things have not got any better since then.