Ex-Google Employee Says Company's AI Work "Poorly Motivated, Driven By Panic"

A former Google employee has said that the work on artificial intelligence (AI) in the tech giant has been driven by "stone cold panic". Scott Jenson, a senior UX designer who left Google in March, said in a LinkedIn post that the company wants to create an ecosystem, like Tony Stark's Jarvis in Iron Man movies. Google has been using AI technology for years in products like text translation and speech recognition. But last year, the company announced its biggest push by integrating large language models and launching Gemini.

But Mr Jenson said there is a fear among Google leaders "that they can't afford to let someone else get there first".

"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.

Mr Jenson later clarified, via an update to his post, that he wasn't a senior leader at Google and that the projects he worked on "were fairly limited".

"My comment comes more from a general frustration of the entire industry and it's approach to AI," he wrote.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr Jenson worked at Google for around 16 years, in three separate stints.