A few years ago, around 2011, Google was in a panic. Facebook was on the rise and Google was confident that the social network would soon take over everything. To combat this blue scourge, then-Google CEO Larry Page issued an executive orderto your many employees: Your bonuses are now tied to Google’s social media success! Embed social features in everything! This memo led to a lot of clumsy social integrations at Google that were widely hated by users. YouTube comments were tied to Google+ and the site was inundated with spam. Creating a new Gmail address also required creating a Google+ account. Little “+1″buttons appeared in Google search, and generally anonymous use of Google products was not possible due to the “real name”policy. And that’s just the Google+ stuff – earlier this memo led to Gmail having a social network called “Google Live Stream”built into it, which all users were initially forced to join.
This forced integration strategy failed miserably, and after several years of Google’s social panic, all Google+ integrations were removed and the service eventually shut down. This past failure doesn’t stop Google from pulling this lose-lose scenario for the next big panic: Bloomberg’s Julia Love and Davey Alba report that Google wants to build ChatGPT-style features into everything. According to the article, Google has issued “a directive that all of its most important products – those with over a billion users – must include generative AI within a few months.”
AI is one of the few areas of Google that CEO Sundar Pichai is actually investing in, and the CEO says the technology will be “more complex than fire or electricity.”Google has been a leader in artificial intelligence for years, with voice recognition features like Google Assistant, speech synthesis features like Google Duplex, and go prowess. However, all these features debuted many years ago, and out of fear of releasing imperfect products, Google locks many of the technologies in a lab somewhere. OpenAI is not afraid to bring the latest AI technologies to the masses. While Google is releasing research papers, OpenAI is releasing products, and the company’s OpenGPT generative AI chat has led to the skyrocketing growth of OpenAI. The chatbot is already built into Bing, and the initial innovation brought Bing 100 million daily active users in its first month. Google is no longer considered a leader in artificial intelligence, and the stock market is punishing it for it.
As for exactly what these forced AI integrations will look like, the report cites a recent YouTube feature that will allow people to virtually swap outfits. In Alphabet’s Q4 2022 earnings report , Pichai said the company is “working to bring large language models to Gmail and Docs,”so expect to see multiple button presses soon and those apps generating blocks of text. A Bloomberg article quoted a Google employee as saying, “We’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, but that’s not even close to what it takes to transform the company and increase competitiveness.”