Ex-Google employee claims AI work "poorly motivated, driven by panic”
text_fields
A former employee of Google claimed that "stone-cold panic" was the driving force behind the tech giant's artificial intelligence (AI) research. According to a LinkedIn post by senior UX designer Scott Jenson, who departed Google in March, the company's goal is to build an ecosystem like Tony Stark’s Jarvis in the Iron Man films.
For years, Google has been integrating AI technology into its products, such as speech recognition and text translation.
The business made its largest announcement last year when it introduced Gemini and integrated massive language models. However, Mr Jenson claimed that Google executives are afraid "that they can't afford to let someone else get there first", NDTV reported.
"I just left Google last month. The "AI Projects" I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this panic that as long as it had "AI" in it, it would be great. This myopia is not something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind," he said on LinkedIn.
"The vision is that there will be a Tony Stark-like Jarvis assistant in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard that you'll never leave. That vision is pure catnip. The fear is that they can't afford to let someone else get there first," Mr Jenson added.
In an update to his post, Mr. Jenson later stated that the projects he worked on "were fairly limited" and that he wasn't a senior leader at Google.
"My comment comes more from a general frustration of the entire industry and its approach to AI," he wrote.