Google’s AI search is a window into its culture

🔎 Google’s original name was, and I kid you not, BackRub. From the beginning, it analyzed a website’s backlinks (incoming traffic from other sites) to determine its rank.
Issue #88: happiness = control, why you don’t have to write every day, and wisdom for entrepreneurs
By Harris Sockel

Last week, Nilay Patel — host of The Verge’s Decoder podcast — searched Google for “best Chromebook” and handed his phone to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. If you’ve used Google lately, you’re probably familiar with what he saw: an AI summary followed by a string of ads. Somewhere buried under all that was an actual result.

“Do you think that’s a good experience?” Patel asked. Pichai never answered.

Google’s AI Overview feature, which suggested people eat rocks and put glue in pizza earlier this year, has drawn a slew of bad press (and spawned some fakes). Google hid the bad search results and claimed they’re taking “swift action” to ensure AI-generated summaries are actually helpful, as opposed to nonsensical. Why can’t a company with Google’s resources — over 182,500 employees, annual revenue of $318 billion — get this right?

For an insider perspective, I revisited this 2023 Medium story from former Google software engineer Praveen Seshadri. He dives deep into the culture inside the company, writing: “It is a fragile moment for Google with the pressure from OpenAI… Most people view this challenge along the technology axis, although there is now the gnawing suspicion that it might be a symptom of some deeper malaise.”

Seshadri remembers a company that lost sight of its mission, caught in “a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for.”

His suggestions for turning Google around are relevant to anyone, in any organization — like this: “Lead with a commitment to mission,” and that mission has to go beyond tech (e.g., using AI) or abstract principles. It has to be about what you’re delivering to real people in the real world.

What else we’re reading

• Yesterday at around 5:00 p.m. ET, Donald Trump became the first former U.S. President to be convicted of a felony. On Medium a few weeks back, attorney Steven Toews, JD, MBA, reminded us that “facts, not lawyers, win cases,” and that part of what might’ve contributed to Trump’s habit of ignoring counsel.
• I cannot stop thinking about this rundown of our flawed perceptions about happiness — a concept often equated with pleasure, riches, or outward success — and how to think about it instead. One insight worth keeping in mind: Numerous psych studies show that our perceived level of control over our lives has a positive impact on our baseline happiness.
• Felicia C. Sullivan reminds us that you don’t need to write every day to become a better writer. Instead, go live your life! Read! Exist! “Growth comes with time, with learning, with reading, with feedback, with the understanding that writing is more than putting words on paper.” So much of your growth as a writer happens when you’re not writing, but living.

💰 Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur Veronica Head reflects on the failure of her startup and comes to a realization: “Investment doesn’t mean you’re successful, it just means you convinced someone to give you money. Use that money to work on your success.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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