The world has been horrified--and amused--by the extreme ideological bent of Gemini, Google's much-hyped new AI tool, which the company launched last month.
But Shaun Maguire, who was a partner at Google Ventures, the company's investment wing, from 2016 until 2019, had a different reaction.
"I was not shocked at all," he told The Free Press. "When the first Google Gemini photos popped up on my X feed, I thought to myself: Here we go again. And: Of course. Because I know Google well. Google Gemini's failures revealed how broken Google's culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world. But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years."
Maguire is one of multiple former Google employees who told The Free Press that the Gemini fiasco stems from a corporate culture that prioritizes the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over excellence and good business sense.
These ex-Googlers, as they're called, said that they were discouraged from hiring white, male employees; that DEI "is part of every single thing" in the company; and that engineers even had to list the "DEI impact" for the tiniest of software fixes. All of them agreed that the Silicon Valley giant entered the artificial intelligence race with an upper hand but has squandered it by cowing to an activist faction in the company that's more committed to advancing social justice than making world-class products.
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And earlier this month, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a room full of entrepreneurs in San Francisco of Gemini: "We haven't fully understood why it leans left in many cases. . . that's not our intention."
LOL.
But the ex-staffers we spoke to said they know exactly how the technology became so biased.
"The model is just a reflection of the people who trained it," one former AI researcher at Google Brain, who asked not to be named, told us. "It's just a series of decisions that humans have made."
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David Kiferbaum, a Google business manager who worked at the company from 2015 to 2023, said he experienced pressure to recruit minorities after Damore was fired. He said he began hearing things like "We're really looking for diverse candidates for this role," which he took to mean "a non-white, a non-hetero" applicant.
"I was like, 'Whoa, I can't believe this person is saying this out loud,' " he said.
Maguire worked for Google Ventures, a division that invested in other tech companies. His employees demanded he hire or promote only women and minorities -- and 25% of the "workers" at his division threatened to quit if he didn't.
He duly hired a "smart but unqualified" woman.
But that was only the beginning of the DEI demands:
"Meanwhile, over the next two years, I started to notice the dynamics of our team change. Instead of highly experienced founders and seasoned investors, young people from minority backgrounds were coming in with virtually no investment experience whatsoever," Maguire recalled. "In this time, Ventures promoted a 25-year-old black woman to investment partner--the same position I held at the time--who had not yet made a single investment decision in her entire career."
When asked for comment, a Google Ventures spokesperson told The Free Press: "These claims from Sequoia Capital Partner Shaun Maguire regarding his time at GV from 2016--2019 are baseless and factually inaccurate. GV's decisions around hiring and promotion are solely based on merit and ability."
The Media Research Center just released a report noting the "41 times" Google has interfered in US elections since 2008.
Google has been getting away with election interference for at least 16 years, and it is showing no signs of stopping.
MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 41 times Google was caught interfering in U.S. elections, beginning in 2008, intensifying in 2016 and continuing into 2024. MRC researchers found carefully crafted studies and numerous reports (from 2008 through February 2024) that have consistently demonstrated the tech behemoth's election meddling.
MRC founder and President Brent Bozell highlighted just how dangerous Google's election interference is. "Google's massive and deliberate efforts to interfere in U.S. elections for the past 16 years is unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today," said Bozell.
Over the years, Google has repeatedly used its power to help push the most liberal candidates to electoral victory while targeting their opponents. In 2008, the company used a light touch helping then-Senator Barack Hussein Obama (D-IL), its favored primary candidate, and undermining his opponent, then-Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
But after Democrats took a devastating loss in the 2016 election, evidence collected by MRC shows that election interference became part of its mission. As one Google executive let slip in a secretly recorded interview, the company was working to actively "prevent[] the next Trump situation."
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Below are some of the highlights of MRC's findings.
In 2008, Google endorsed the radical, young Sen. Obama and censored support for Sen. Clinton. Journalist Simon Owens reported at the time that the tech giant suspended the accounts of writers who wrote pro-Clinton blogs critical of Obama. "[N]early all of [the censored bloggers] had three things in common," Owens wrote. "Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website."
Google allowed users to smear then-leading GOP candidate for president Rick Santorum. Google refused to correct a "Google bomb" that smeared Santorum. Google "bombing" used to be a way for users to manipulate Google's algorithm and associate websites and names with undesirable search terms. Google Search would connect the sites and terms if enough websites placed the same hyperlink over the same term or terms. The Big Tech company previously claimed that it had ended the popular internet pranks and had even corrected the issue when it impacted the White House's webpage for Obama. But when Santorum's team brought the issue to Google's attention, the platform flat-out refused to resolve it, once again favoring Obama.
In 2016, Google employed both its algorithm and its "partners" in futile attempts to push Clinton over the finish line. One study by SourceFed found that Google's algorithm excluded potentially damaging autofill results for searches inquiring about Clinton's alleged crimes and possible indictment during her scandalous tenure as Secretary of State. Google hid her flaws and instead suggested that users search for things like "Hillary Clinton crime reform" and "Hillary Clinton India" but did not do the same for other contentious searches for candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The platform also worked with "partners" to bolster Latino votes, in the hopes of propping up Clinton, according to internal emails uncovered by then-Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson. A leaked email chain showed one employee explaining how Google made a "silent donation" by working with its partner Voto Latino to pay for Latino voters to get rides to the polls in "key states." The tech giant also "helped them create ad campaigns to promote the rides." These and similar methods of election interference and censorship likely contributed to the 2.6 million votes that Google shifted in 2016, according to data scientist and research psychologist Robert Epstein.
Elon Musk, who knows about censorship as the owner of Twitter, says Google has interfered "thousands" of times:
This article understates the magnitude of the problem -- Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season!
This is to be expected when their censorship (aka "Trust & Safety") teams are have far left political views. https://t.co/y36yzdzIUQ
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2024
Even the French are noticing that Google's search results are terrible. LeMonde:
Regarding Google, are the search results really becoming worse and worse?
For years, internet users have complained about the quality of the responses presented by the world's most used search engine...
The Mountain View firm is apparently trying to rebuff the claims of critics who, for months and even years, ask why the results offered [by Google] are less and less good. [A "journalist" from NBC wondered, on February 24th, if "anyone had had enough and quit Google."
Has anybody finally had enough and quit Google search because of how bad it's gotten recently? Are you finding another search better?
-- Kevin Collier (@kevincollier) February 24, 2024
On Reddit, one finds more posts by users wondering why their search results seem worse than they were before. "There was a time when one had the impression that Google was magic," wrote The Atlantic in September, looking back to a time which seems to be over.