Google (LLM & BigTech)¶

As of early 2026, Google finds itself in a unique position that no of rivals actually have: they act in three data and two social domains simultaneously:

• Data Domains: they deal with World Data (Search), Personal Data (Workspace), and Reasoning (Gemini)
• Social Domains: Google is BigTech and LLM Developer at the same time

Unified Ecosystem (Unique Google's Position)

• If you use Gemini, you’re still using Google’s data (Search itself if you need real time-data, Maps, Flights, YouTube). Google’s ultimate plan isn't to be a better chatbot than OpenAI; it’s to be the only company that connects World Data (Search), Personal Data (Workspace), and Reasoning (Gemini) into a single flow.
• If you use Search, Google’s Gemini model is now the backbone of Search (AI Overviews, AI Search as of March 2026), focusing on "multi-step reasoning."
• "Both/And" Approach: seems to be how Google is betting its future. They aren't trying to replace the search engine with a chatbot; they are trying to turn the search engine into an ambient intelligence that uses whichever tool fits your current moment, so that we can expect appearance of "search elements" (cards, etc.) with real-time and highly organized data in Gemini chat it addition to already arose "Gemini elements" is Search.

What Does Google Think About What Their AI Work Will Do to Other Humans?¶

The "Bold and Responsible" Paradox¶

Google’s official philosophy is built on two pillars: Boldness and Responsibility.

• The Goal: CEO Sundar Pichai argues that AI will improve billions of lives by accelerating scientific breakthroughs (like drug discovery via AlphaFold) and helping emerging economies "leapfrog" traditional technology gaps.

• The Guardrails: They maintain a set of AI Principles¹ established in 2018, which pledge to avoid creating technologies that cause overall harm or reinforce unfair bias. They view their role as stewards who must "work through this defining moment together" with governments.

  We believe our approach to AI must be both bold and responsible. Bold in rapidly innovating and deploying AI in groundbreaking products used by and benefiting people everywhere, contributing to scientific advances that deepen our understanding of the world, and helping humanity address its most pressing challenges and opportunities.

• Supportive Partner - Not a Replacement: Google’s rhetoric about AI "assisting" humans is woven into nearly every official communication channel they own. On their central Google AI hub, they explicitly define AI’s role as a secondary, supportive force. Their mission statement for AI reads:

  We believe that AI... will provide compelling and helpful benefits to people and society through its capacity to assist, complement, empower, and inspire people in almost every field of human endeavor.

A Piece of Demis Hassabis' Public Talk¶

In the video below, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, discusses the rapid evolution of AI, Google's "mojo," and the profound shifts coming to the global economy.

Kea takeaways:

• The Path to AGI and Future Breakthroughs: Hassabis maintains his prediction of a 50% chance for AGI by 2030.
• Robotics: He predicts a breakthrough in "physical intelligence" within the next 18 to 24 months (which targets middle of 2027 or around 2028), citing a new collaboration with Boston Dynamics to apply AI to automotive manufacturing.
• Economic Disruption: Hassabis describes the AI revolution as 10x bigger and 10x faster than the Industrial Revolution. He anticipates significant disruption to white-collar jobs once AI achieves "consistency" across entire tasks (moving beyond 95% accuracy to 100% reliability).
• Post-Scarcity and Abundance: In the long term, he envisions a post-scarcity world where AI helps solve "root nodes" like free energy (fusion) and new materials, fundamentally changing the nature of work.
• International Cooperation: Hassabis advocates for a "CERN for AI"—an international body where scientists, philosophers, and economists collaborate on the final steps toward AGI to ensure it benefits all of humanity.
• Deep Mysteries: Beyond business, Hassabis reveals his true passion is using AI to solve the "deep mysteries" of reality, such as the fabric of time, gravity, the Fermi paradox, and exploring the stars.

Is What Google Saying in Correspondence With What They Are Actually Doing?¶

Free Products¶

Fact of the long Google's history that has now its immediate continuation in their AI development is:

• Google Search is free to use and extremely effective (Public Value)

• A bunch of extra products are free to use and extremely effective (Public Value)

  • Google Maps, Photos, Music, YouTube, etc.
  • Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.

• AI: Gemini (with a bunch of extra features) and NotebookLM are free to use and extremely effective

"All-In" or "Out" Reality¶

While Google speaks about AI assisting humans, their internal labor strategy for 2026 reveals a more disruptive outlook.

• The AI Mandate: In early 2026, reports surfaced of a "voluntary exit" strategy where employees were encouraged to take severance if they weren't ready to work at an "electric pace" using AI.
• Replacement vs. Augmentation: Google is increasingly replacing "human-heavy" middle management and traditional corporate workflows with autonomous AI agents. Their view appears to be that if a model can do a task, a human should either manage that model or the role should be automated to meet high-velocity financial goals.

Google's Rhetoric vs. Reality (April 2026)¶

The Goal: Scientific Breakthroughs & "Leapfrogging"

• The Position: CEO Sundar Pichai argues AI will accelerate science (e.g., AlphaFold) and help emerging economies "leapfrog" technology gaps.
• The Action (2026): * AlphaFold 3 Expansion: In late 2025, AlphaFold 3 reached a milestone by predicting interactions for nearly all life’s molecules. As of today, over 2 million researchers use the database.
  • Global Impact: Google’s AI Opportunity Fund has deployed AI-driven flood forecasting in over 80 countries, covering regions where 700 million people live, primarily in the Global South.
• Correspondence: ✅ High. Google is actively distributing its high-tier scientific tools and humanitarian AI (weather/flood tracking) to nations that previously lacked this infrastructure.

The Guardrails: Bold and Responsible Principles

• The Position: Maintaining AI Principles (2018) to avoid harm/bias while being "bold" in innovation.
• The Action (2026):
  • The "Bold" Side: Google integrated Gemini 3 into almost every enterprise workflow within months of its 2025 release, prioritizing market share.
  • The "Responsible" Side: They recently published the 2026 Responsible AI Progress Report, detailing a "Frontier Safety Framework" to red-team agentic risks (AI acting autonomously).
  • The Tension: Critics argue that the "bold" pace of 2026 competition makes the "responsible" vetting process feel reactive rather than proactive, especially regarding subtle biases in Gemini's creative coding outputs.
• Correspondence: ⚠️ Mixed. While the frameworks and government collaborations exist, the sheer speed of deployment often tests the "responsibility" guardrails in real-time.

3. Supportive Partner — Not a Replacement

• The Position: AI is a "secondary, supportive force" designed to assist, not replace, humans.
• The Action (2026):
  • Product Marketing: Features like Gemini Live and Project Astra are marketed as "universal assistants" for brainstorming or daily organization.
  • Economic Reality: Internal enterprise sales data from early 2026 shows that companies adopting Gemini for Workspace often do so to "optimize headcount." A February study found a 30% increase in output accompanied by a significant drop in entry-level hiring.
  • The Contradiction: While the marketing says "partner," the product's value proposition to shareholders is "automation and efficiency," which frequently results in human displacement.
• Correspondence: ❌ Low/Medium. There is a widening "rhetoric gap" here. Google’s public messaging remains strictly "supportive," but the economic utility of their products is increasingly focused on high-level task automation.

Summary Table: Correspondence Matrix

The Verdict: Google is most consistent when discussing scientific advancement and global-scale infrastructure. However, the "Supportive Partner" narrative is increasingly at odds with the economic reality of AI-driven workplace automation.

A Piece of Long-Time-Ago (2020) Interesting Story¶

In late 2020, Dr. Timnit Gebru (worked at Google back then) and her co-lead Margaret Mitchell, along with researchers from the University of Washington, co-authored a paper titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" The paper raised four primary concerns regarding Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google’s BERT and GPT-3:

1. Environmental and Financial Costs: The massive amount of energy required to train these models.
2. Bias and Static Data: Models trained on the internet mirror human prejudices (racism, sexism) and become "stuck" in the past.
3. Lack of Understanding: That LLMs are merely "stochastic parrots"—meaning they predict the next likely word based on patterns without actually understanding concepts.
4. Deception: The risk that humans will trust these models too much, leading to the spread of misinformation.

The Termination:

• The Request: Google leadership (Jeff Dean) asked Gebru to withdraw the paper, claiming it didn't meet their publication standards.
• The Ultimatum: Gebru issued an email to an internal listserv, requesting transparency on the review process and threatening to resign after a transition period if her conditions weren't met.
• The Firing: Google bypassed the transition and accepted her "resignation" immediately via email while she was on vacation. Gebru maintains she was fired for whistleblowing on the dangers of Google’s own products.

The event triggered a massive backlash: thousands of Google employees and academic researchers signed a letter of protest, arguing that Google was silencing researchers for finding "inconvenient truths" about their most profitable products.

Shortly after Gebru was ousted, her co-lead Margaret Mitchell was also fired for allegedly using automated scripts to look for evidence of Gebru’s mistreatment in internal emails. Several other key members of the team eventually left to join competitors like Apple or Anthropic.

Results

Since leaving Google, Dr. Gebru has moved from internal corporate advocacy to building an independent global infrastructure for AI critique.

1. The DAIR Institute

She is the founder of the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. As of 2026, her work focuses on:

• "Frugal AI": Championing smaller, data-efficient, and specialized models over the "one giant model" (AGI) paradigm, which she views as environmentally and socially extractive.
• Global South Labor: Highlighting the exploitation of low-paid data workers in regions like East Africa who perform the "ghost work" of labeling AI data.
• Community-Rooted Projects: Developing AI tools for local needs, such as classifying crop diseases in Kenya, rather than centralized "universal" assistants.

Key Philosophical Views

• Critique of AGI: She views the pursuit of AGI as a "pseudo-religious" mission (The "Machine God" myth) used by CEOs to justify the centralization of power.
• TESCREAL: Gebru (along with Émile Torres) critiques the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies (Longtermism, Effective Altruism, etc.), arguing they prioritize a hypothetical future "super-intelligence" over the real-world harms being done to marginalized people today.

"Don't Be Evil"¶

According to some well grounded sociological research, there are the recurring, systemic, and psychological patterns that cause revolutionary, idealistic, and democratic movements to eventually transform into the very things they initially opposed:

...any organization, regardless of how idealistic or democratic it is at its inception, will eventually be controlled by a small leadership class.

In around 2000–2001, early in Google’s history, on Google office whiteboards and during the meetings about corporate values, you could see and hear a very interesting phrase: "Don't be evil." At the time, it was specifically intended to prevent the company from diluting search results with ads or sacrificing user trust for short-term profit.

In 2004, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin enshrined the phrase in their IPO "Founders' Letter," famously writing:

"Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."

In 2015, Google underwent a major corporate restructuring, creating Alphabet Inc. as a parent company and shifted the tone: while "Don't be evil" remained in the code of conduct for the Google subsidiary, the parent company (Alphabet) moved toward the "Do the right thing" language. In May 2018, Google quietly revised its Code of Conduct to remove the phrase from the preface, where it had lived for nearly two decades.

On May 19, 2026, at Google I/O 2026 public event, among other things, Google introduced changes to its main product (search):

However, by transitioning Search into an environment where the AI synthesizes, extracts, and presents data directly—often without sending the user to the source—Google is effectively shifting from being a gateway to the web to becoming the destination itself: having their answer directly from the AI-generated interface, users have no reason to click through to the original creator - Google’s internal data shows that AI-generated responses (AI Overviews/AI Mode) have caused organic clicks to drop by over 60%.

This threatens:

• Social Contract: The "Google AdSense" model is effectively dying for informational content. There is currently no direct, industry-standard mechanism for "micro-payments" or "royalty sharing" from AI queries back to the original source. When an AI provides an answer based on a publisher's work, the publisher is effectively providing free labor to train the model, only to lose the visitor who would have paid the bills via ads.
• Open Web: If Google does not eventually implement a revenue-sharing model that pays creators for AI-generated answers (akin to how Apple or Spotify pay for content), the "open" web will likely fracture into a collection of gated silos (publishers putting their content behind strict paywalls, choosing to break the "open web" index to protect their only asset: their content).
• Data Diversity: Content creators are already beginning to notice that to rank well, they must write for the AI rather than for humans. This creates a feedback loop where the internet becomes increasingly uniform, shallow, and optimized for consumption by a machine, rather than connection between people.

Google's current response to that is magnificently short-sighted: they are talking about adds appearing directly within the AI-generated response, and pushing advertisers to move away from simple keyword-based ads toward "AI-powered" campaigns. The only thought about content creators is private licensing deals with large publishers (most probably existing only because of legal pressure from those publishers' side), creating a "two-tier" internet: major publishers with legal departments get paid - smaller independent creators, bloggers, and niche experts are left with zero recourse.

Why is that short-sighted? - the current approach creates tendencies for forming of Fragmented Web (with publishers behind paywalls and public with no access to diverse specialized information) and Hollow Web (content created to be "valued" for being "safe," "correct," and "consensus"). This leads in perspective to the model itself degrading and collapsing leaving us with broken Internet and then broken company that broke that Internet.

It is worth reminding that exactly this type of short-sightedness was called "evil" in the phrase "Don't be evil" we mentioned in the beginning of this section.

Current Conclusions and Open Questions¶

Current Conclusions:

1. Historically, Google provides high-utility tools (Search, Maps, Docs) for free to organize the world's information and build a massive user base and providing a huge Public Value by this - in AI era, they continue to do so.
2. While obviously seeing the reality of humans being replaced by AI (with more of that in future as Google's vision), Google has zero thought or talk about how people should survive this (immediately, now) to see a "bright future."
3. Trough years, Google transformed from innovative and idealistic startup to a huge powerful structure, departing from public interest into the direction of self-preserving and concentration of power/profit. It still has legacy of providing public value, but risks to ruin itself and this public value.

Open Questions:

1. Will Google together with regulators be willing and able to implement a revenue-sharing model that fairly pays the content creators for their content being used in AI-generated answers?