Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks
404media.co
404media.co
Memegen is a key part of the culture. Its default mode is over-the-top mocking, of course, with a grain of truth. Nobody and nothing is spared. C-level execs, products, the perf process.
So this by itself is not quite the scoop 404 media thinks it is. You could take the front page of memegen on any given day and construct twenty scandalous headlines of it.
(Observe that normal human beings will also lie to you on the internet, about everything from the best flavor of ice cream to cancer treatments.)
If I can make this 5 trillion AI cook a Google mushroom... the mitigating answer is not ...oh Humans also get fooled by David Blaine.
"I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes" - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
You must like burgers...
That demonstration is interesting, but not really something new. Fooling very intelligent people into believing something completely absurd is incredibly easy. How many scientific papers have been retracted based on wholesale fabrications that fooled an entire review committee?
The question isn't "What is the dumbest thing I can do with this technology?" its "What is the most valuable thing I can do with this technology?"
An air conditioner is technology so dumb that it can be used to kill an infant with hypothermia.
A human is a sentient being so dumb that it can be made to believe in things far more outlandish than a “Google mushroom”.
I can keep going. The point is that just about anything useful can do something dangerous or stupid. Most people can see that. Most people are more interested in how useful something can be, not how useless it is when intentionally misused.
Yes, it's because they're using a cheap model to answer my question. Yes, I know how a tokenizer works and why this happens. No, I don't think the tech industry is in an insane place at all, why do you ask? /s
Tried zooming in on text on iOS. Ads filled the screen and some random other imgur link loaded. Nope.
Kinda wanted to see what you shared, but that’s as far as I got.
So this article boils down to "On a site that focuses on extreme positions drawn from a very large population of people, we found extreme positions about this product." Doesn't really tell you much about the product or the very large population. You can make the same statement about most products and most very large populations.
Disclaimer: Xoogler, worked at G 10+ years.
404media, please, take a deep breath. Your jobs are safe, your trauma is valid. Your corruption coverage is so good, but this 'employees make memes' editorial decision-making is exposing some deep insecurity I can't quite triangulate.
The engineers who critique AI are the ones who see the garbage code the LLMs write. Just look at the source dump for Claude Code; that code was a rat's nest of epic proportions.
But it can also help Sr engineers, differently. They tend to use it in smaller, more tightly scoped use cases. Well scoped re-factoring, boilerplate stuff, improving personal tools, etc. The improvement is not nearly as visible or measurable to managers.
Over the years I’ve worked with a few engineers who talked this way. Ironically, they often ended up being a bigger drag on the team than the “lower skilled” developers they looked down on. Dismissing entire groups of engineers rarely produces much insight.
My experience is that the loudest voices tend to be at the extremes. One side treats LLMs as magic and attributes every productivity gain to AI. The other contributes little beyond “LLMs are garbage and make mistakes.” Neither position is particularly useful.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. LLMs are genuinely helpful for many tasks and can make good engineers more productive. They also make mistakes, sometimes serious ones, and still require judgment, design skills, and review. Most engineers I know who use them regularly seem to understand both sides of that tradeoff.
Framing this disagreement as a fundamental misunderstanding of the technical capacity and appropriate use cases, for me, completely misses the plot. Both sides have compelling reasons for their beliefs and the cold rational analysis of the tech is as likely to further entrench the extremes as it is to enlighten.
I will also note that in your comment, you lament the dismissal of entire groups of engineers while doing exactly this when you dismiss the loudest voices (as well as those who think highly of their own ability) and imply that it is the loudest voices who are inherently extreme and therefore inferior to the pragmatic engineer who understands tradeoffs and cost benefit analysis.
Disliked thing can have positive utility? Must mean the criticism is wrong. gg's in chat and checkmate, atheists.
Can't it be 404 throwing a little egg on google's face? Point out their shit smells every once in a while.
Yeah, there's no big revelation here. Just what you would expect the rank and file at a slopshop subjected to the current state of AI think of the slop when they ain't publicly shilling for the home team.
But pointing this all out is fine, especially when there's plenty of other coverage where everyone pretends like obvious open secrets aren't true unless a peer-reviewed meta-analysis proves it. And even then we should still give them the benefit of the doubt because maybe this time it's different.
If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
* other recent examples:
You also get the sense that the Excel memes are made by folks who are proud of their expertise in Excel; I don’t get that pride from the Google memes. Put another way, the folks inside the house are calling out the hype. (That said, I broadly agree with the serious tone of the article being out of step with the evidence they’re sourcing.)
> After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."
At no point has Google engineering culture actually embraced this at the ground level. This isn’t a change, this is the existing disconnect between the workers and the managers.
I'll let that stand on it's own.
Can anybody comment on whether that statement is an accurate reflection of how management at google treats these memes? On surface level it seems like they don't mind the memes and even use them as feedback but I wonder if that's how it really plays out
Memegen is something that HR wants gone, but knows it cannot afford to take away as they already made Google a worse place to work at during the past 10 years. They already sort of hijacked it and took control of it.
A long long time ago I used to work at Yahoo. There was an internal mailing list called "devel-random@yahoo-inc.com", which was basically a forum for engineers to let off steam. I used to enjoy the occasional emacs-vs-vim threads, or the ribbing it frequently gave to Jan Koum (founder of Whatsapp).
When Marissa Mayer became CEO in 2012, one of the first things she did was to join this forum, to get a pulse on the developers.
I know this, because my VP comes running to me one day: how do I join this group "devel-random"?
I asked him: are you sure you want to join it? It's a huge time suck if you're not careful.
No, no, he replied; Marissa wants us to join it so we can get a feel for the company (turned out she said no such thing, but you know how senior management is: aping everything that a CEO does).
A couple of weeks later he quietly quit the list. :-D
Not everyone will use Memegen in the same way. But quite often a high voted meme can be treated like a high voted bug report. It provides signal to the team.
Note that I worked on internal tooling. External facing teams have lots of other feedback channels, and they know that Googler's feedback is biased. So how the team responds to the feedback can be vary a lot.
I've used and hated other internal tools - stuff like JIRA and Workday - that were just accepted as terrible and never going to improve.
Gemini CLI was atrocious. It's now being shuttered to AG but its very hard to use due to the limiting usage constraints
Claude is better and Codex remains king of actual usage you can get.
Oh and the OG AI department at Google had essentially everyone fired (you know, the one that had linguists) and then the AI department that took over was taken apart, half fired, to have it's corpse picked over by Deepmind. Everyone who mattered left (over 40) with only ONE real exception.
Meanwhile firing a third of the rest of the company, to make sure that whoever remains encounters company morale somewhere between mandatory fun and PIP.
Oh and you're wondering about the management reaction? They canceled PIPs (you're now fired when you'd normally have gotten a PIP)
Which also resulted in many memes of people who just don't care anymore directly criticizing leadership. Things like "Wondering about senior management? Just ask yourself how this can be made worse. For example: how can a PIP be made worse? This is how"
Google? They are shoving AI into every product for sure, but the company is going to do ok even if they immediately stop all AI work. Their revenue comes from ads, cloud etc, and AI doesn't directly translate to revenue much.
Then I tried to use Gemini for coding and it was like being back to GPT3 or something. Really bad. But on this topic at least it had possession or access to more knowledge than GPT.
The low light of the show is the Anti-gravity app. The updates are few, and the updates does background bugs that no one really cares about. They add no features. The non-customizable "Open IDE" is classic greedy Google, they want you to stick to their tools. Vs Codex, they allow it.
Have you ever worked at an employer where everyone is pressured to only say good things about the product? You have to drink the kool-aid, or at least pretend to, and always talk about how great the product is? It's not good and it doesn't help the product. Being able to admit when things are bad is really important, even if it comes in the form of memes and humor.
Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
It's promising technology, but the tools are far from mature yet.
And as they do mature, the ramp up will decrease and their won't be any particular benefit to being an early adopter. For reasonably bright people, there's essentially no penalty to "missing out" for a while.
As often, the FOMO-afflicted are churning on stuff that just won't matter. Which is fine if they enjoy it, but isn't something the rest of us need to fret over.
Keep abreast, don’t lose sleep, don’t sacrifice work-life balance. Help each other, especially your coworkers. The current craze seems to have created stack ranking monsters out of the whole industry.
I wish we could convince folks to write docs for human consumption, but docs are docs....
Depends on your line of work. I regularly try to incorporate it with mine and find myself telling it that it's wrong more often than not. I'm yet to be convinced that double-checking and correcting an LLM's work has saved me any more time than wading through garbage SEO-filled results to find what I need.
>Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
The cockiness/hubris is real.