On January 17, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, issued an internal memorandum predicting that additional layoffs will be necessary by 2024 to achieve the company’s “ambitious goals” across multiple domains, artificial intelligence (AI) included.
In the memo titled “2024 priorities and the year ahead,” Pichai stated, CNBC and The Verge observed and reported, “We have ambitious objectives and will invest in our major priorities this year.”
“The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”
According to the Google executive, this may necessitate the elimination of roles and “layers to streamline execution and increase velocity” for specific teams. Nevertheless, he added that the layoffs “will not affect every team” and will not be as extensive as they were the year before.
According to Sundar Pichai, some departments will continue to make “resource allocation decisions.”
In January 2023, approximately at the same time as the previous year, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced a 6% reduction in its worldwide workforce. As of September of that year, the organization had terminated the employment of 182,381 individuals globally.
AI is one of Google’s primary investment areas for 2024; the company intends to unveil its objectives later this week.
Google released Gemini, its most potent model to date, in December. At the time, it was considered a “GPT-4 killer” due to rumors that it was on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which is presently the market leader.
Numerous users, however, claimed that the promotional video for Gemini embellished the truth to portray the model more favorably, which resulted in a divided reception. In response, Google denied any manipulation of promotional content for the sake of “brevity.”
Google subsequently reduced the price of its pro version of the AI model Gemini and announced its intention to increase the accessibility of its tools for developers to generate their iterations, akin to the capability of ChatGPT that enables premium users to create customized GPTs.
