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- Google's AI focus shifted after reorganizing under Alphabet in 2015, the creator of Gmail says.
- He said the shift prioritized search monopoly over AI innovation, impacting Google's edge.
- AI's disruptive nature conflicts with ad-driven search profitability, creating inherent tension.
Google should be dominating the AI arms race — right?
When Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, launched the company in 1998, they envisioned it as an AI company, Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said on a recent episode of the Y Combinator Startup podcast. Over the years, it gathered the building blocks to do so: volumes of data, high-level talent, and computational resources.
But Google's AI rollouts have been anything but groundbreaking.
Its new AI search feature, AI Overviews, promised to deliver neat, AI-generated summaries with Google search results. Within days of its release in May, though, it was generating strange responses, like telling users to put glue on pizza. The company also lost $100 billion in market value in a single day in April when its then ChatGPT competitor, Bard, spit out a wrong answer during a demonstration.
Buchheit — who is also credited with coming up with Google's original motto, "Don't be evil" — thinks Google may have lost its way when it reorganized under its new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015. The founders stepped back, and CEO Sundar Pichai took the helm. That's when its focus shifted to preserving its monopoly over search, Buchheit said.
"They have, you know, this gold mine, like search is just so valuable," he said. Meanwhile, "AI is an inherently disruptive technology."
When you directly answer queries from users — the way a chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT might — you disincentivize them from clicking on ads, he explained.
"A search company has an inherent tension between profitability and giving the right answers because there's always a temptation that if you make your results worse, people will actually click on more ads," Buchheit said.
That's not just Buchheit's analysis; it's something Page and Brin noted in their seminal 1998 paper introducing Google. They said search engine technology has been "largely a black art" and "advertising-oriented." With Google, however, their goal was to "provide high-quality search results over a rapidly growing World Wide Web."