Hugh Langley

Mineral will spin out of X and become a business under the parent company Alphabet, Mineral CEO Elliott Grant wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Killing off projects had become something of a tradition at Kittyhawk, the secretive flying-car startup launched by the Google cofounder Larry Page. But for many employees, this one stung the most.In April 2022, its CEO, Sebastian Thrun, gathered staffers to announce that the company was officially shutting down its most promising project to date: an air taxi named Heaviside, which Thrun himself was set to fly on its maiden voyage. Employees who’d poured their hearts into the project were dismay…

Google will start soliciting feedback from staff on a weekly basis as it reboots the company’s internal survey.The “Googlegeist” survey, which was distributed annually, has long served as a way for staff to anonymously share how they feel about leadership, compensation, and their teams.In an all-hands meeting on Thursday, Google’s chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, told staff the new Googlegeist would be sent more frequently, with employees receiving two questions every Tuesday, according to a…

Google has ended a practice that alerted employees when they were at risk of being labeled a low performer, Insider has learned.Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, informed staff last week that the company had ended “support check-ins,” where managers would meet with at-risk employees to help them improve, according to a person who attended the meeting.Support check-ins — or SCIs, as they were called internally — were introduced as part of a performance-management system known as GRAD,…

Morgan Overholt saw half of her website’s traffic disappear overnight.“This is a joke,” another person wrote on a forum for website owners. “I’ve got long-form content, well written, well researched, filled with original image content LOSING to 500 word AI generated crap…Google is apparently forcing publishers to generate AI spam or die.“Those are just two voices in a chorus complaining that Google’s latest “helpful content” update – which is meant to improve the quality of search results – has…

Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin is back at the search giant — and that includes hyping up its AI work at “TGIF” meetings.Brin appeared onstage during a special 25th-anniversary edition of Google’s monthly all-hands meeting (known as “TGIF,” or Thank God It’s Friday) on September 26. A recording seen by Insider shows Brin receiving rapturous applause from employees.At the meeting, Google leaders reflected on the company’s past 25 years, and Brin spent about five minutes talking about the “profound…

Google Assistant and Bard are starting to merge.The company announced Wednesday that it was planning to bring its Bard AI chatbot into the Assistant app and experience, starting on mobile devices.The result, a new experience Google has named “Assistant with Bard,” sees Google making its existing voice assistant more personalized by effectively placing Bard inside it.Assistant users can expect to get (or at least eventually get) the same Bard experience as they do on desktop, along with its integ…

Google is changing how its sales teams work as the internet giant tries to promote an important AI-powered advertising product, according to multiple sources.Some of the ad giant’s sales staffers who work with large companies are shifting to sales teams that are dedicated to selling to smaller, less sophisticated advertiser clients, according to multiple sources.These smaller advertisers work with the Google Customer Solutions (GCS) team and spend between $250,000 to $2 million per quarter, acco…

Google has laid off a handful of employees who worked on its voice assistant, Insider has learned.Several employees working on Assistant were informed on Monday that their roles were being eliminated, according to a person familiar with the matter and an internal employee document that tracks employee layoffs across the company.The total number of affected employees could not be learned, but the internal document claimed up to 20 individual contributors were laid off. The affected employees were…

YouTube’s big bet on the NFL Sunday Ticket may be paying off, with YouTube TV becoming the fastest-growing Google product over the past year, according to internal growth metrics viewed by Insider.YouTube TV grew 48% from October 2022 and October 2023, as shown by data from an internal Google system called Magic Eye that tracks the growth of company products and how they fare against rivals.The television streaming service also saw the highest engagement of any Google product as well as the high…