Good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times — or so the old adage goes. On the heels of Google’s disastrous Gemini AI rollout, a new report shows the tech giant has turned this timeless wisdom into reality.
As a new report from Pirate Wire points out, Google’s known nothing but good times. It “scaled to global dominance” in only a few short years, and ushered in an era of “unprecedented corporate abundance.” It reportedly attracted people who “never needed to fight” for anything at the company, and, as a result, have “no conception of its value.” With this sort of culture, it’s no surprise that Google has devolved into a “DEI hivemind,” where endless time is wasted on feelings and sensitivity, rather than creating anything of value.
“In the words of one senior engineer, ‘I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google,'” the report said.
Google’s Culture of Fear
inside the dei hivemind that led to gemini’s disaster
New reporting from @micsolana
Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool… pic.twitter.com/9PLkfO8yDh
— Pirate Wires (@PirateWires) March 4, 2024
However, leftist dogma is only a symptom of this broader culture of weakness. The company’s main problem, according to the report, is that “nobody’s in charge”: 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.” Much emphasis reportedly goes to fostering a positive “work-life balance,” leaving the most productive employees annoyed at all the wasted time. To make matters worse, each team is incredibly “siloed off” from each other, according to the report. The only thing connecting them is a “powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma,” the report claimed.
The report details conversations with employees across the company — from “management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing” — who all largely said the same thing: a “culture of fear” pervades Google. Employees aren’t just fed up with “woke lunacy,” but the trade-offs it requires. With employees afraid to speak out about the toxic environment, the most technologically brilliant minds pay the price, leading to the “dearth of innovation” that destroyed Google’s once hotly anticipated foray into artificial intelligence. (RELATED: Here Are The Most Insane Responses We Got From Google’s New ‘Woke’ AI)
New game: Try to get Google Gemini to make an image of a Caucasian male. I have not been successful so far. pic.twitter.com/1LAzZM2pXF
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) February 21, 2024
Every employee interviewed in the report “shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified.” Everyone “had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit” and everyone “shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager.” There are myriad DEI groups “populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products.”
Instead, so much time is reportedly wasted policing innocuous so-called microaggression:
[F]rom screenshots I’ve obtained, 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. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group).
Combined, all of these factors led to the Gemini AI disaster, best known for “erasing white people from human history.” “According to people close to the project,” the report notes that the “team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its ‘over-diversification’ problem before launch,” but “understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.”
I’m the VP of AI Governance at Google ($7.5M TC). I’m responsible for publishing and implementing our AI principles, which required transferring content from emails received from our PR team to the website.
Excited about governance? Our team is expanding, and we’re seeking… pic.twitter.com/iQHFNXbdzW
— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) March 5, 2024
In fact, it was specifically designed to do so. The report details how a “diffusion model” was designed so that a prompt of “‘show me an auto mechanic’ becomes ‘show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat.'” (RELATED: JOHN STOSSEL: If You Value Your Privacy, Delete Your Apps)
One engineer was asked, “‘It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?'”
“‘Yes,'” he said, according to the report. “‘We spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.'”
This is only possible in an asylum where the lunatics have taken over. Google has been so successful that it could afford to spend time coddling its employees, but as a result, it lost the ability to demand performance. Leadership reportedly excels at “saying nothing” while the best engineers are passed over to further the interests of the company’s least innovative department — human resources. The company suffers under this paradigm but can hold out as long as times remain good.
But the Gemini debacle is more than just an embarrassment, it’s a sign of hard times coming. Google can’t afford to lose in the battle to control the cutting edge of AI. As the report notes, “If the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash.”
In short, if Google loses on AI, it will reportedly become a “new kind of bank,” managed by “a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses.”
“That’s interesting, I guess. But it’s not a technology company,” the report concluded.