Buchheit says this in a recent episode of the ‘Y Combinator Startup’ podcast. The engineer, who left Google in 2006, claims that the development of artificial intelligence was held back by other considerations. ‘I think they mainly wanted to protect and maintain their search monopoly,’ he says in the podcast. According to him, this happened after founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin reduced their roles at Google.
Protecting Search Business
In an article on technewsworld , Ross Rubin, principal analyst at consulting firm Reticle Research, notes that Google wasn’t the only tech company caught off guard by ChatGPT’s massive popularity, but it had more to lose from developing it. “Given that Google’s business is driven to such a high degree by search and advertising revenue, it’s more important for them than Apple or Amazon to be able to leverage generative AI in a way that protects or expands their search business,” he says.
Buchheit points out that Google had good reason to worry that AI would decimate its search goldmine. “If you actually give people the right answer, they don’t have to click on a whole page of ads,” he explained. And that tension between profitability and getting the right answers is something the company has been aware of from the start: “There’s always a temptation that if you make your results worse, people will click on more ads. And AI has the potential to disrupt that.”
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