Google executives are leaving after decades and it seems to be the fault of their AI. Employees complain about heavy bureaucracy

A few months ago, we saw how Google employees exploded against their CEO for making millions of dollars to do his job, despite the fact that his artificial intelligence, Bard, failed to be a revolution within the company. of this software that marks the year, and while massively laying off thousands of people from its workforce.

Generally Key members of Google’s “old guard” have changed roles or leave the company while she searches for her new identity. As CNBC collects, some say they left their roles for a new challenge and others did so to look for opportunities in artificial intelligence.

Among the big changes of the year, we have the former CFO Ruth Porat, the executive director of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki (who led in her 8 years as leader of this platform to lead her industry) resigned from her position, employee number 8, Urs Hölzle, and Robert Kyncl, commercial director for 12 years, who left his position to become CEO of Warner Music Group at the beginning of the year.

Susan Wojcicki had been with Google for over 25 years, after lend their garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page;, which will be used as the first office. While he will continue to take on an advisory role at Google, he said he wants to “start a new chapter.”

Artificial intelligence: a race behind Google

The company was caught off guard last fall when OpenAI launched its AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot into everyone’s hands. The software giant found that its search business could be threatened, even more so when Microsoft integrated these capabilities into its Bing. ,

All this without forgetting that Sundar Pichai, the CEO, had been talking about the company’s “AI First” strategy since 2016, but little had managed to shine a light. Bard came to the market with little success and it was even known that the company had asked all its employees to make maximum efforts to see and correct the errors of this AI.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI” and one of the most respected voices in the field, told The New York Times in May that he was leaving Google and warning the world of the potential threat of AI, which he believes will arrive sooner than expected.  He even went so far as to say he didn’t sleep, though he defended his company and attacked Microsoft for rushing its launches and driving the entire market to rush as well.

Anyway, CNBC recalls that before that, there has been a major internal reorganization in Google’s AI teamsThe company promoted its DeepMind subsidiary CEO Demis Hassabis to lead AI for the entire company, and former McKinsey executive James Manyika to become Google’s senior vice president of technology and partnerships. to monitor Google searches.

Meanwhile, Google’s director of artificial intelligence, Jeff Dean, who has worked at the company since 1999, He then became chief scientist and, although the company called him a promotion., in practice, Dean left his important leadership role in AI to become an individual contributor, supposedly helping to oversee Gemini.

Dissatisfaction with employees

Employees’ perception of the company has also changed in recent years and not everyone thinks Google is one of the best places to work. Among other issues, he doesn’t like the fact that “it’s become more bureaucratic than it was in its early days.” Former company employee Praveen Seshadri in a Medium article talked about this and the pressure that the company feels between OpenAI and Microsoft.

“I left Google understanding How a once great business slowly stopped workingSeshadri wrote on his blog detailing the challenges of Google’s growing bureaucracy. This post that went viral was about processes and workers, “like mice, are trapped in a maze of approvals, Launch process, legal reviews, performance reviews, executive reviewsdocuments, meetings, error reports, classification, plans followed by other plans” (among others).

At the time, Noam Bardin, who left Google in 2021, shared Seshadri’s post on LinkedIn and himself, a few years earlier. had written that employees have no incentive to create Google products.. This man was the leader of startup Waze and says his problem was believing that you can keep the magic of startups within a big company.

In fact, like Seshadri and Bardin, several AI specialists left the company, saying it had become too bureaucratic. to get things done, like eight AI researchers who created “Transformers,” an integral part of the infrastructure behind ChatGPT among others and left the search giant in recent years.

The image | Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash