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.
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."
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."
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.
"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."
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