“Don’t Be Evil” got them a lot of public goodwill as a company motto. The only reason to get rid of it was because it was legit starting to get in the way of them doing what shareholders wanted.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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This is more about the drive to be a leader in AI than the public goodwill.
The antitrust stuff revealed a lot but one of the major things it revealed is that Google views chatgpt as the biggest existential threat to search. Younger users skip Google now.
Of course this is because Google spent the past 5-10 years abusing their monopoly protected position to worsen their product so user engagement would go up (a more frustrating search experience means you’re more likely to search several queries, being delivered multiple pages filled with ads and tracking bullshit instead of just one).
But they won’t reflect on that and improve their product. They will leave it as is and try to make their shit AI blurb at the top of search work better. This is inherently foolish vs something like chatgpt because google search is typically fed much less robust prompts. They get something like “best bank account” or “2014 nba mvp” whereas users are conditioned to given chatgpt a conversational prompt, “what bank has the best rate for savings accounts right now?”. The former is part of why you see much more misconception, incorrect information, and hallucination with googles ai shit.
But again they won’t reflect on this. They won’t bow out. They won’t partner. They will simply eat power and literally burn the world to make something that’s not as good as the already underwhelming gpt5 to keep that stock price rising because the investors are stupid and need to see buzzword bullshit even if it comes at tremendous cost
Don't be evil*
*definition of evil may be changed at any point and has no relation to the official dictionary.
Maybe Google is building their own gas power plants, just like these guys.
https://datacenters.google/operating-sustainably/
It looks like they're not changing their emissions/sustainability goals for the data centers, which honestly is better than every other player right now.
The political climate makes greenwashing problematic, which is some real irony.
I shit on Google for lots of reasons, but barring a fundamental change in the market, at least they're building renewable energy and taking the local water table into account in decision-making.
Pichai is a McKinsey husk and most of their leadership are yes men. Somehow they're still better than Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and obviously better than Xitter (with their trailers of methane burning generators).
Being better than Meta is not exactly a high bar to clear.😄
Anyway, it’s nice to see that Google is taking at least one thing seriously.
Nah. Rookie numbers. Burning high sulfur coal is the way to maximize pollution, suffering and death. Might not be as cheap as solar, but that’s the price you have to pay if you want to be the number one enemy of humanity and the rest of the planet.
Reminds me of the alt text for https://xkcd.com/2948/
"An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill."
😆 Randall knows what he is talking about.
How shocking