Another Google PR Disaster

Short term thinking at its finest

Google recently began rolling out SGE to genpop in the USA.

The results have been… extremely predictable for anyone who’s been paying attention to Google’s shenanigans over the past few years.

The new AI overviews are getting tons of flack on social media and mainstream media for being hilariously (and sometimes dangerously) inaccurate.

• Google Search’s AI falsely said Obama is a Muslim. Now it’s turning off some results, from CNN

• Google’s AI Overview Appears To Produce Misleading Answers, from Forbes

• Google’s AI keeps hallucinating, from Bloomberg

Screenshots are going viral as we speak (I’m sure you’ve seen tons of them). Here are a few of the classics:

Of course some are clearly fake, like this one:

Ofc the mainstream media can’t keep up and decided to report the above fake screenshot as a real AI overview (example). What do you expect? The people at these companies are dinosaurs.

But the real AI hallucinations are bad enough that they’re causing a major PR headache for Google, especially since it’s not a one-off.

I’m sure you remember the Google Gemini disaster from earlier this year.

I personally think Google should stop trying/failing to jump on the AI bandwagon and should instead return to their core competency: being an internet search engine.

I know expecting companies to focus on what they’re good at is an insane concept these days, but historically it’s had good results.

Google had a semi-functioning product for decades. Throwing it all away to chase a trend that they clearly don’t have even the slightest bit of competency in is CLEARLY going to backfire tremendously in the long run.

The key words here are “in the long run”.

The unfortunate reality is that the current leadership at Google isn’t worried about long-term performance. Not even a little bit.

Sundar Pichai used to work for McKinsey. If you know anything about McKinsey then you know their forte is jacking up short term profits at any cost.

They’ll sacrifice literally anything: consumer/employee safety (including people’s lives), public reputation, long-term stock market performance. Anything to bring in more money and increase market cap in the short term. They advised Enron, they promoted mortgage-backed securities, and even helped Purdue Pharma hook the nation on OxyContin.

And Google’s CEO used to work for them.

So of course Alphabet’s stock price is at an all-time high.

Sundar isn’t a retard. He knows what he’s doing and he’ll be long gone with golden parachute in hand by the time the company starts seeing real consequences from his decisions. He’s not going to lose a single cent from any of this.

So if you’re confused and wondering why Google is seemingly self-destructing you have to remember: it’s all about keeping their stock price high in the short term.

Just like companies adding ‘dotcom’ to their names 25 years ago, any corporation that can plausibly or semi-plausibly claim to be an ‘AI company’ on their earnings calls is seeing excellent results vis-a-vis their share price.

Whether the AI features are actually good for their business or good for consumers in the long run is irrelevant.

Predicting the future is always a fraught endeavor, but I don’t think I’m taking much of a risk by saying that I think we’re going to see more bad decisions coming out of Google HQ in the near future. A lot more.