Rob Knight

7 observations while reading the Google CEO email about Gemini: ⁃It gets off to a bad start with the use of “problematic” — a word used almost exclusively by political activists, corporate bureaucracies, and the progressive left. At a time when Google is being accused of being all three, setting this tone isn’t helpful. ⁃But isn’t his audience just Google employees? No, this was clearly written with the expectation that it’d be made public. Probably vetted by a dozen people. The description of Gemini as “formerly Bard” and marketing taglines sprinkled throughout are more clues that this was meant to be public. ⁃So why was Gemini problematic? Because its “responses have offended our users and shown bias.” This is stunning. It’s totally divorced from the real problem and what people were actually mad about. Google focusing on not offending people instead of factual accuracy was what CAUSED the problem in the first place. ⁃Then he promises to “address these issues,” but syntactically, “these issues” refer back to people being offended, not the actual problems. Vague language like this is meant to avoid accountability and dance around the real problem. ⁃This email was clearly written by a committee. If you boil down the second paragraph, it basically says: we’re working to fix it, and we’re already fixing it, and nobody’s perfect but we’ll keep at it, and also we’ll review what happened and we’ll fix it. Frankenstein paragraph. ⁃“We’ll be driving a clear set of actions” is the opposite of clear. How do you “drive” a set of actions, and why does the list of actions include “recommendations”? Again, more word soup presumably designed to make the reader too tired and confused to be angry anymore. ⁃The last paragraph of an email like this is usually used to rally the troops. This one went with: “we have an incredible springboard for the Al wave.” I’m sorry but this is cringe. Serious people in AI don’t speak like this. It’s out of touch to the end. Important note: emails like this are hard to pull off. Many people put in many hours to write this, in an effort to fix a problem that wasn’t their fault. This isn’t a comms problem. The obfuscation, lack of clarity, and fundamental failure to grasp the problem are due to a failure of leadership. A poorly written email is just the means through which that failure is revealed.