Inside the Crisis at Google

Organizational dysfunction is still common within Google, something it s worked to fix through recent layoffs, and it showed up in the formation of its Gemini team. Moving fast while chasing OpenAI and Microsoft, Google gave its Product, Trust and Safety, and Responsible AI teams input into the training and release of Gemini. And their coordination clearly wasn t good enough. In his letter to Google employees addressing the Gemini debacle this week, Pichai singled out structural changes as a remedy to prevent a repeat, acknowledging the failure.

Those structural changes may turn into a significant rework of how the organization operates. The problem is big enough that replacing a single leader or merging just two teams probably won t cut it, the Google Trust and Safety employee said.

Already, Google is rushing to fix some of the deficiencies that contributed to the mess. On Friday, a reset day for Google, and through the weekend when Google employees almost never work the company s Trust and Safety leadership called for volunteers to test Gemini s outputs to prevent further blunders. We need multiple volunteers on stand-by per time block so we can activate rapid adversarial testing on high priority topics, one executive wrote in an internal email.

And as the crisis brewed internally, it escalated externally when Google shared the same type of opaque public statements and pledges about doing better that have worked for its core products. That underestimated how different the public s relationship is with generative AI than other technology, and made matters worse.

via www.yahoo.com

Will the Behemoth turn its head? I doubt it.