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☆ Google Employees Tune Out Antitrust Threat as Trial Comes to a Head
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-03 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Tuesday, Google’s employees gathered for an all-hands meeting named T.G.I.F. These companywide meetings are rarely held on Fridays these days, but the name has stuck. Executives shared highlights from a recent earnings report and cloud-computing conference, and warned workers against taking disruptive actions in the wake of internal protests against a cloud-computing contract with Israel. But no one in the meeting, two employees said, broached a topic that could have a dramatic impact on Google: its landmark antitrust trial with the Justice Department, where arguments are finally coming to an end this week. For eight months, while tech policy experts have tried to divine what a Google victory or loss would mean for the power of tech giants in the United States, Google’s employees have mostly ignored the antitrust fight, according to interviews with a dozen current and recent workers, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the legal matter.

Organizations: Google, Justice Department Locations: Israel, United States

☆ Friends From the Old Neighborhood Turn Rivals in Big Tech’s A.I. Race
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-29 | by ( Cade Metz | Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Today, they are two of the most powerful executives in the tech industry’s race to build artificial intelligence. Dr. Hassabis, 47, is the chief executive of Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central research lab for artificial intelligence. Mr. Suleyman, 39, was recently named chief executive of Microsoft AI, charged with overseeing the company’s push into A.I. In 2010, they were two of the three founders of DeepMind, a seminal A.I. research lab that was supposed to prevent the very thing they are now deeply involved in: an escalating race by profit-driven companies to build and deploy A.I.

Persons: Mustafa Suleyman, Hassabis, Demis, —, Suleyman Organizations: National Health Service, Queen Elizabeth’s, Google, Microsoft, Big Tech, DeepMind Locations: Syrian, Cypriot, London

☆ Alphabet’s Revenue Jumps 15% to $80.5 Billion
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-25 | by ( Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Thursday, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported strong revenue growth in its latest quarter from its search engine and video platform, YouTube, as its market-leading position in online advertising continued to reap rewards despite recent fluctuations in the industry. Alphabet reported $80.5 billion in quarterly sales, up 15 percent from a year earlier, and above analysts’ estimate of $78.8 billion. Analysts had expected $18.9 billion. The company’s board also approved a $70 billion share repurchase program. Google’s search engine has proved most resilient to the fluctuations that have happened since, emphasizing its role as a gateway to the internet for billions of people.

Organizations: Google, Meta, Facebook

☆ Google Fires 28 Employees Involved in Protest of Israeli Cloud Contract
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-18 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Google on Wednesday fired 28 workers after dozens of employees participated in sit-ins at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale, Calif., offices to protest the company’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. A day earlier, nine employees were arrested on charges of trespassing at the two offices. “Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. Google recently fired an employee who disrupted an Israeli technology conference in New York. And the company is even planning to make changes to a corporate forum because employees were bickering about the conflict.

Organizations: Google Locations: York, Sunnyvale, Calif, Gaza, New York

☆ Google to Tone Down Message Board After Employees Feud Over War in Gaza
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-08 | by ( Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nearly 14 years, an online message board called Memegen has served as a virtual water cooler for Google employees. But Google executives, after watching employees snipe about the war in Gaza in recent months, are making big changes to turn down the temperature on their company’s beloved message board, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. One of the most significant tweaks to Memegen will be the removal of a virtual thumbs-down. Well-liked memes rise to the top of Memegen based on those votes. Another change will be the removal of metrics that allow people to see how popular other employees’ memes have become.

Persons: Memegen Organizations: Google, The New York Times Locations: Gaza

The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4, which was widely considered one of the world’s most powerful A.I. models and was the basis of the latest version of the ChatGPT chatbot.

Persons: OpenAI, Greg Brockman Organizations: YouTube, Google

☆ Google to Delete Billions of Chrome Browser Records in Latest Settlement
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-01 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In recent months, Google has raced to settle a backlog of lawsuits ahead of major antitrust showdowns with the Justice Department later this year. On Tuesday, the company resolved its fourth case in four months, agreeing to delete billions of data records it compiled about millions of Chrome browser users, according to a legal filing. v. Google, said the company had misled users by tracking their online activity in Chrome’s Incognito mode, which they believed would be private. In December, Google resolved a suit with dozens of attorneys general claiming it strong-armed app makers into paying high fees. And in March, Google agreed to pay a Massachusetts company, Singular Computing, an undisclosed sum after being accused of stealing patent designs — a claim that Google denies.

Persons: Chasom Brown, et Organizations: Google, Justice Department Locations: Massachusetts

☆ Ex-Google Engineer Charged With Stealing A.I. Secrets for Chinese Firm
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( Glenn Thrush | Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A Chinese citizen who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him secretly, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday. Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designs and maintains Google’s vast A.I. supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the “architecture and functionality” of the system, and of pilfering software used to “orchestrate” supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and A.I. technology.”From May 2022 to May 2023, Mr. Ding, also known as Leon, uploaded 500 files, many containing trade secrets, from his Google-issued laptop to the cloud by using a multistep scheme that allowed him to “evade immediate detection,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California. Mr. Ding was arrested on Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, Calif., not far from Google’s sprawling main campus in Mountain View, officials said.

Persons: Linwei Ding, Ding, Leon Organizations: Google, Prosecutors, Northern, Northern District of Locations: California, Beijing, Northern District, Northern District of California, Newark , Calif, Mountain View

☆ Google Settles Smaller Lawsuits as It Prepares for More Antitrust Fights
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In December, Google spent $700 million to resolve states’ claims that its Play Store had strong-armed app makers into high fees and tough terms. About six weeks after that, Google paid $350 million to end a lawsuit accusing it of improperly sharing users’ private information. On Monday morning, a Massachusetts company called Singular Computing said it had resolved its lawsuit with Google, involving claims that the tech giant had stolen its chip designs. Singular said in a news release that it had “entered into a settlement and patent license agreement with Google.”Google is also on the verge of a fourth legal settlement in three months to end claims that it has misrepresented the privacy settings of its Chrome web browser. In just a few months, Google has spent well over $1 billion to clear the decks for court fights that could prove far more damaging to the company and that could reshape the entire internet industry: two federal suits brought by the Department of Justice, targeting Google’s search engine and its advertising business.

Persons: ’, “ Organizations: Google, Department of Justice Locations: Massachusetts

☆ Google Chatbot’s A.I. Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-22 | by ( Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Now Google has temporarily suspended the A.I. chatbot’s ability to generate images of any people and has vowed to fix what it called “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions. “We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a statement posted to X on Thursday. It initially refused, but then he added a misspelling: “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier.” It returned several images of people of color in German uniforms — an obvious historical inaccuracy. The A.I.-generated images were posted to X by the user, who exchanged messages with The New York Times but declined to give his full name.

Persons: “ We’re, Gemini Organizations: Google, New York Times Locations: German, ”

☆ Google Is Giving Away Some of the A.I. That Powers Chatbots
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-21 | by ( Cade Metz | Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Now, in an indication that critics of sharing A.I. Google released the computer code that powers its online chatbot on Wednesday, after keeping this kind of technology concealed for many months. Much like Meta, Google said the benefits of freely sharing the technology — called a large language model — outweighed the potential risks. The company said in a blog post that it was releasing two A.I. language models that could help outside companies and independent software developers build online chatbots similar to Google’s own chatbot.

Persons: Meta, Gemma 2B, Gemma 7B Organizations: Google

☆ Google’s Once Happy Offices Feel the Chill of Layoffs
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-05 | by ( Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker returned from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Mass., office one afternoon in October, his work badge couldn’t open a turnstile. He quickly realized it was a sign that he had been laid off. Ms. Hirsh Theriault soon learned that most of her fellow Google News engineers in Cambridge had also lost their jobs. More than 40 people in the news division were cut, a company union said, though a number of them were later offered jobs elsewhere inside Google. Ms. Hirsh Theriault’s experience is increasingly common at Google, where rolling job cuts in recent months, after a year of significant layoffs, have employees on edge.

Persons: Diane Hirsh Theriault’s, Hirsh Theriault, Hirsh Theriault’s Organizations: Google Locations: Cambridge

☆ YouTube Cuts 100 Employees as Tech Layoffs Continue
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-17 | by ( Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Google will cut 100 employees at its video platform, YouTube, on Wednesday, continuing piecemeal layoffs after shedding more than a thousand jobs in the past week. The tech giant notified workers from YouTube’s operations and creator management teams that their positions had been eliminated, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times. YouTube, the world’s most popular video service, employed 7,173 people on Tuesday, a person with knowledge of the total said. “We’ve made the decision to eliminate some roles and say goodbye to some of our teammates,” YouTube’s chief business officer, Mary Ellen Coe, wrote in a note to employees at the organization. The layoffs, which were earlier reported by the blog Tubefilter, primarily affect groups of employees who offer support to YouTube’s millions of content creators, two people with knowledge of the cuts said.

Persons: “ We’ve, ”, Mary Ellen Coe Organizations: Google, The New York Times, YouTube Locations: Americas, Asia

At 1 p.m. on a Friday shortly before Christmas last year, Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, summoned four of his employees and ruined their weekend. The group worked in SL1001, a bland building with a blue glass facade betraying no sign that dozens of lawyers inside were toiling to protect the interests of one of the world’s most influential companies. For weeks they had been prepping for a meeting of powerful executives to discuss the safety of Google’s products. The deck was done. But that afternoon Mr. Walker told his team the agenda had changed, and they would have to spend the next few days preparing new slides and graphs.

Persons: Kent Walker, Google’s, Walker Locations: SL1001

Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. If that happens, Mr. Musk said, we’re doomed. Finally he called Mr. Musk a “specieist,” a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future. That debate has pitted some of the world’s richest men against one another: Mr. Musk, Mr. Page, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the tech investor Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

Persons: Page, Musk, we’re, ”, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, OpenAI Organizations: Valley, Meta, Microsoft Locations: Silicon

☆ Google’s C.E.O. to Take Another Turn on the Antitrust Witness Stand
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-14 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Testifying under oath is a task that many tech chief executives might be asked to do in the coming years, with Amazon, Meta and others facing their own antitrust court fights. Though he was never called to the witness stand to testify, Bill Gates, who was chief executive of Microsoft in the last big technology antitrust case brought by the Justice Department more than two decades ago, came across as combative and evasive in depositions. Mr. Zuckerberg has at times exasperated lawmakers with vague responses, while Mr. Altman appeared to charm senators in a hearing this year. The main duty on the witness stand for Mr. Pichai — a low-key and detail-focused executive — has been to keep the temperature low under questioning and keep to the central point of Google’s antitrust defense: that it is an innovative company that has maintained its leadership through innovation and hard work instead of illegal monopolistic behavior. The Justice Department filed its landmark antitrust suit against Google in October 2020, arguing that the company’s default-search deals with phone makers and browser companies helped it illegally maintain a monopoly.

Persons: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, Altman, Pichai, — Organizations: Amazon, Microsoft, Justice Department, Google

But on the witness stand, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said there was “value” in being the default search engine on a device and framed the agreements with other companies as sound business decisions. Google paid $26.3 billion for its search engine to be the default selection on mobile and desktop browsers in 2021, according to the company’s internal data presented during the trial. Kevin Murphy, a Google economic expert, testified on Monday that Google shared 36 percent of search revenue from the default deal with Apple. Mr. Pichai testified that he repeatedly renewed the search engine deal with Apple because it worked well, leading to an increase in search usage and revenue and benefiting Apple, Google and its shareholders. They cited an instance in 2014 when Mozilla, which makes the Firefox browser, exited a default-search partnership with Google and selected Yahoo.

Persons: Sundar Pichai, Kevin Murphy, Pichai, ” Organizations: Google, Apple, New York Times, Mozilla, Yahoo

On Monday, Epic Games, the company behind the hit game Fortnite, will appear in federal court in San Francisco to kick off a monthlong trial in its own antitrust lawsuit against Google. Epic is expected to argue that Google is violating both state and federal antitrust laws — as well as its founding principle, “Don’t be evil” — by wielding monopolistic power over app developers on its Google Play Store on Android mobile phones. The video game developer had tried to bypass the Play Store’s fees by letting Fortnite players pay Epic directly for in-app items, prompting Google to bar the game from the store. (The company says 99 percent of developers qualify for a fee of 15 percent or lower on in-app purchases. Larger app makers like Epic must pay 30 percent.)

Organizations: Google, Justice Department, Games Locations: Washington, San Francisco

As Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, tells it, his company has always been on the side of consumers. It has paid billions to other industry giants, like Apple and Samsung, he said, to make sure Google’s internet search engine worked as well as it should on those companies’ devices. “Given that Apple designs the experience, it wasn’t clear how they would change the experience if the financial incentive wasn’t there,” Mr. Pichai said while testifying for more than three hours. The Google chief was the highest profile witness to testify so far in the 10-week trial. The monopoly trial — the first involving a tech giant of the modern internet era — reflects increasing efforts in Washington to rein in the power of Big Tech.

Persons: Sundar Pichai, Pichai, Department’s, ” Mr Organizations: Apple, Samsung, Google, Big Tech Locations: Google’s, Washington

☆ Google Search Boss Says Company Invests to Avoid Becoming ‘Roadkill’
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-26 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

The Justice Department has spent weeks arguing in a federal antitrust trial that Google has built an impenetrable barrier around its search business with strong-arm tactics and multibillion-dollar deals. But a Google executive said on Thursday that he didn’t see it that way. Google presented a starkly different picture of how it has built and maintained the internet’s most dominant business as it began its defense in the landmark trial. The key, said Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president overseeing search and other products, has been constant investment and innovation. Dr. Raghavan described Google’s path from its once-unimaginable rise over his former employer Yahoo to fears that its business could be disrupted by formidable competitors.

Persons: Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s, Raghavan Organizations: Google, Yahoo

☆ Inside Google’s Plan to Stop Apple From Getting Serious About Search
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-26 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For years, Google watched with increasing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its longtime partner and sometimes competitor would eventually build its own search engine. Those fears ratcheted up in 2021, when Google paid Apple around $18 billion to keep Google’s search engine the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The same year, Apple’s iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users richer web results like those they could have found on Google. Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple’s search ambitions. Google’s anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business.

Organizations: Google, Apple, The New York Times, Big Tech

☆ Alphabet Has Strong Ad Sales but Cloud Business Disappoints
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-24 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

A rebound in digital advertising led to an uptick in revenue and profit for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, but investors were underwhelmed by its cloud computing business, which badly trails those of rivals Microsoft and Amazon. Alphabet reported $76.7 billion in quarterly sales, up 11 percent from a year earlier, and roughly in line with analysts’ estimate of $76 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet. The internet giant said that its profit jumped 42 percent to $19.7 billion, exceeding Wall Street expectations of $18.5 billion. “Investors were disappointed by the relatively weak performance at its Google Cloud Platform, which is at risk of falling further behind” Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Jesse Cohen, an analyst at investing.com, wrote in a note.

Persons: FactSet, Jesse Cohen Organizations: Microsoft, Google, Web Services, investing.com

The head of Instagram’s Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: The major online platforms are breaking up with news. Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark.

Persons: Campbell Brown, —, Adam Mosseri, Elon Musk Organizations: Twitter, Google, Publishers Locations: Instagram

In a court filing last month, Google argued that it needed its privacy in an antitrust trial that would spotlight its dominance in online search. It was part of a pattern of Google’s pushing to limit transparency in the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era. v. Google, enters its third week in court, it is shaping up to be perhaps the most secretive antitrust trial of the last few decades. Not only has Google argued for the landmark trial to be largely closed off to the public, but so have other companies that are involved, such as Apple and Microsoft. Apple even fought to quash subpoenas, describing them as “unduly burdensome,” to get its executives out of giving testimony.

Organizations: Google, New York Times, Apple, Microsoft

☆ Google Connects A.I. Chatbot Bard to YouTube, Gmail and More Facts
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-19 | by ( Nico Grant | More About Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In March, Google released an artificial intelligence chatbot called Bard. It was Google’s answer to OpenAI’s hugely popular ChatGPT. Within weeks, Google revamped the tool with upgraded technology, but ChatGPT continued to be the chatbot that captured the public’s attention. On Tuesday, Google unveiled a plan to leapfrog ChatGPT by connecting Bard to its most popular consumer services, such as Gmail, Docs and YouTube. Though Bard has not received as much attention as ChatGPT, Google’s A.I.

Persons: Bard, ChatGPT, Google’s Organizations: Google Locations: Bard, Similarweb

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