Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

[Valin]

The Free Press

I walked around every day at work policing my own actions and language.’ Google’s culture is broken, former employees tell The Free Press. Can it be fixed?

Francesca Block and Olivia Reingold

March 19, 2024

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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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In August 2017, James Damore, then a twentysomething Google software engineer, sent a memo to all employees called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Damore argued that the company’s political bias toward the left “has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” Damore suggested, among other things, that “discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech” was “misguided and biased.” Within a month, Google fired him for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.” 

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Maguire described working at Google, even in a senior role, “like being in an authoritarian country where only certain views and people were accepted.” 

“I walked around every day at work policing my own actions and language,” he said. “Even expressing a positive opinion about one or two of the policies of Trump, who I didn’t even like, would guarantee being ostracized by my colleagues. Back in 2016, I donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign because I knew it would be public and knew it would get me points inside Google and insulate me when I inevitably got in trouble for doing something unintentionally wrong.”

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