Google’s London head office costs as much as a tech unicorn and the company’s UK boss, Debbie Weinstein, says it vibrates with a similar ethos.
“It feels like startup energy,” he says.
Yet we meet on a morning when Google has been threatened with a reckoning reserved for members of the corporate establishment, not the tech naive: a breakup.
Hours earlier, the US Department of Justice had asked a federal judge to order the sale of Google’s Chrome browser, along with a series of other actions, including putting its search index (a database of all the web pages you have crawled) available to competitors. This follows a ruling by the same judge in August that the $2 trillion company has built an illegal monopoly in the search market.
“We have made it very clear that we do not agree with the judge’s conclusions,” says the 51-year-old American, adding that at least Judge Amit Mehta’s verdict concluded that Google operates the “best” search engine. According to Mehta, that success has come at an unacceptable cost to the competition.
The process will drag on, says Weinstein – “I think this will take many years to resolve” – so in the meantime, the focus needs to be returned to the UK and artificial intelligence.
“While I work in the UK, my goal here is to ensure that we continue to create products that enable everyone in the UK to take advantage of the important shift towards AI that is taking place,” he says. “And try not to get too distracted by the fact that (the case) is going on behind the scenes.”
This is where the reference to startups comes into play, as Weinstein acknowledges that Google is far from its origins in a California garage – “obviously, at this point we are a very large company, not even remotely a startup” – but that the AI has been given a new phase of development dating back to the early days of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. “That energy you have when creating something new… it feels like we’re living that moment right now at Google,” he says.
The Google-owned Central Saint Giles office we’re talking about cost the company $1 billion (the same valuation assigned to so-called tech unicorns), which shows how far the business has come from that temporary home. in 1998.
Google is also building another large office nearby. Work on its new £1bn British headquarters in King’s Cross began in 2017 and extends up to 330m, making it longer than the height of the Shard skyscraper at 310m. King’s Cross is also the location of Google’s artificial intelligence unit, Google DeepMind, led by Sir Demis Hassabis.
Weinstein has direct experience of building a business before becoming CEO of Google in the UK and Ireland. She was an executive at US media group Viacom and Unilever before joining Google, but between those roles she also founded a children’s food company in 2006, which closed after a year and a half. “I founded and closed a business, so it wasn’t successful,” he says, adding that being an entrepreneur seemed “really very lonely; “I miss being part of a team.”
And he adds: “I think I am really effective in large organizations. “I am effective at galvanizing teams, focusing them on what matters.”
For creative professionals and publishers grappling with the rise of generative AI (products like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can create realistic voice, text, and images from simple prompts), Google is one of several tech groups multinationals with supreme resources that are challenging their livelihoods with AI tools.
Creatives’ concerns center on copyrighted material, such as novels, song lyrics, scripts and news articles, which have been used, without compensation, to “train” AI models to produce their products.
In an interview with Guardian In September, Weinstein urged the United Kingdom to relax restrictions on a practice known as text and data mining (TDM), where the copying of copyrighted works for non-commercial purposes, such as academic research, is permitted. Google wants to allow commercial use of TDM, such as training new AI models. Weinstein’s comments – “the unresolved copyright issue is an obstacle to development,” he said at the time – drew pushback from Justine Roberts, chief executive of the website Mumsnet, who wrote that she was left with “the jaw on the floor” when he read Weinstein’s speech for a relaxation of copyright law.
A month later, tens of thousands of creative professionals, including Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus and actress Julianne Moore, signed a statement warning that the unlicensed use of their work in AI models was a “significant and unfair threat” to the media. life of artists.
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Weinstein speaks surrounded by the work of copyright holders, in the library of the Central Saint Giles office, and points out that Google already offers creatives and publishers the option to block the use of their content in training models .
“We certainly believe there needs to be an opt-out and today we allow it,” he says, although the organizer of the AI letter has said opt-out schemes do not offer strong enough protection. Weinstein adds that Google would like to see an EU-style regime where TDM is allowed for commercial reasons, as long as there is an opt-out option. She says: “We are seeking clarification at EU level that will allow us to conduct model training here for commercial purposes, not just for research purposes.”
Weinstein calls integrating AI into the UK workforce “the main thing I’m working on” and last month Google launched a program to encourage small and medium-sized businesses to adopt AI tools.
Weinstein’s statement reflects where tech companies are in the AI investment boom: Amazing progress has been made, but companies and governments now need to deploy these AI tools so companies like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft can generate a return on your substantial capital investments.
This has led to predictions that AI will eventually lead to the displacement of large numbers of jobs. Weinstein’s argument, echoed by companies like Microsoft, is that AI models will take over everyday tasks, freeing up more productive work.
The biggest opportunity, he says, is for employees to “find ways to apply these tools to their daily work and actually eliminate some of these administrative tasks that aren’t fun for most people.”
The main job threat, he adds, is competing with people who are ahead in the adoption of technology. “It’s not about AI replacing you. It’s about being replaced by someone who uses AI better than you,” he says. “It’s more about being out-competed in the market.”
CV
Age 51
Family Married, one daughter.
Education Brown University and Harvard Business School.
Pay Not disclosed.
last vacation Cycling in France.
The best advice you have ever been given. “Find and harness your superpowers.”
Phrase she overuses “Right now it’s probably ‘study hard.’ “My daughter has to decide which university she will go to.”
how she relaxes Cooking with my family.