Free Republic

Let me start by telling you that I am perhaps unrivaled in my disgust for Google, parent company Alphabet, feckless CEO Sundar Pichai, and every single one of the company's products and services. I've gone so far as to switch to a paid search engine — Kagi — as part of my endless quest to remove myself forever from Google's revenue stream yet remain an internet user. .... Google's Gemini team went to extra-special lengths to make the image generator as Woke as humanly possible, doing everything within their digital powers to lecture users, scold users, to erase white people...

Users slammed Google’s artificial intelligence tool, known as Gemini, as “woke” after it refused to show images of white people and created historically inaccurate images in the name of diversity. In response to the issue, Google announced the company is pausing the Gemini artificial intelligence image generation feature. According to The New York Post, some examples of the artificial intelligence tool’s inaccurate creations when asked to generate images included a black man representing George Washington and an Asian woman dressed as the pope. The Verge reported another example of Google’s inaccurate artificial intelligence tool was discovered when it generated Asian...

The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found deceased at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday. His grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, confirmed the devastating news in a Facebook post. The student, identified as Marco Troper, was discovered unresponsive in his dorm at the Clark Kerr Campus, a student housing complex, around 4:23 p.m. local time. Despite immediate life-saving attempts by the Berkeley Fire Department, Troper was pronounced dead at the scene. The University of California Police Department (UCPD) stated that there were no signs of foul play discovered, according to the New York Post. The heartbroken grandmother...

THE SCOOP Google is laying off hundreds of people working on its voice-activated Google Assistant software and eliminating a similar number of roles on its knowledge and information product teams, a Google spokesperson confirmed to Semafor on Wednesday. Google told Semafor the restructuring would help improve Google Assistant as it explores integrating newer artificial intelligence technology into its products. The company announced in October that it was using its generative AI chatbot Bard to build a new version of Google Assistant that “extends beyond voice, understands and adapts to you and handles personal tasks in new ways.” Google has been...

Google confirmed it will lay off hundreds of staff members who helped recruit and hire employees, as Silicon Valley continues its cost-cutting efforts. The latest cuts come after Google parent Alphabet in January eliminated 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its workforce, across the company as it grappled with economic uncertainty that hit the company’s bottom line last year, especially its core advertising business. During Google’s July earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was continuing to slow its “expense growth and pace of hiring.” “We continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing...

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in mid-July that some Muslims’ opposition to LGBTQ curriculum in K-12 education is being fueled by American right-wingers, video shows. Just when you thought Trudeau couldn’t offend any more people, or do something even stupider than that haircut he got in 2022, he outdid his own stupidity in spectacular fashion. While speaking with Muslim Canadians at a mosque in Calgary in mid-July, he seemingly lectured his constituents on why they feel the way they do about Pride events in the education system, according to a video shared on social media. “People on social media,...

Government investigators are reporting that Google co-founder Larry Page has disappeared after a subpoena was issued for his testimony in a Jeffrey Epstein underage trafficking case. Authorities in the U.S. Virgin Islands issued subpoenas against Page and Google parent company Alphabet in the lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase & Co. bank. The lawsuit accuses JPMorgan, America’s largest bank, of playing a role in Epstein’s international child sex trafficking operation. However, a new legal filing reveals that investigators have been unable to locate Page since the subpoena was issued. Authorities have now been forced to ask Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing...

The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), has sent subpoenas to five prominent U.S. Big Tech executives, demanding information on their censorship practices. “Today, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed the chief executive officers of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft for documents and communications relating to the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech,” the committee announced in a statement Wednesday.

More Google employees will be at risk for low performance ratings and fewer are expected to reach high marks under a new performance review system that starts next year, according to internal communications obtained by CNBC. In a recent Google all-hands meeting and in a separate presentation last week, executives presented more details of its new performance review process. Under the new system, Google estimates 6% of full-time employees will fall into a low-ranking category that puts them at higher risk for corrective action, versus 2% before. Simultaneously, it will be harder to achieve high marks: Google projects 22% percent...

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, suffered a 27% drop in third-quarter net profit, as search engine ad sales failed to meet projections. Alphabet also recorded a double-digit percent decline in net income, through the first nine months of the year, The Epoch Times reported Wednesday […] “Alphabet missed Wall Street’s target for revenue growth in the third quarter as ad sales remained weak,” The New York Times reported Tuesday, noting that the company’s weak search ad sales for the quarter of $39.5 billion failed to hit the $41 billion level analysts expected. As a result, at least 21 analysts cut their...

Google is planning to offer much faster broadband speeds in the US areas where it operates its fiber networks, all the way to 100Gbps.Google Fiber, part of the Access division of the search giant's parent company, Alphabet, currently provides a 1Gbps service, and began upgrading its speed in 2021 with the introduction of a 2Gbps product offering downstream bandwidth of 2Gbps and upstream bandwidth of 1Gbps for $100 a month.That comes up against AT&T Fiber's similar tier at $110, Verizon Fios and Ziply Fiber's 120 plans, and Frontier's Fiber 2-gig is $150, although, of course, Google's $100 pricing may not...

If you haven’t yet heard new Italian leader Giorgia Meloni’s pro-family speech, YouTube may not be the best place to get an earful.Giorgia recently became the first female prime minister in the country’s history, which might’ve been viewed favorably by the Left. However, she doesn’t share their views; hence, they won’t call it a win.In fact, legacy media have essentially characterized the lady as evil.From CBS News:It’s a stunning victory for Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy Party — stunning because it was just a fringe party until a few short years ago, and stunning because of Italy’s disastrous...

Why would a country undermine phonics? One of the most startling queries I ever received came from a teacher in Israel. Here is the entire communication: I watched some of your youtube videos with thirst and feel the frustration that I feel when I tutor private elementary students, who come without any clue as to how to read English, as if for 5-6 years all they had done was filling workbooks and learning word lists. Older students keep telling me their teachers insist on guessing from texts and looking for clues when words are unknown, and they fear to use...

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...

There were rumors in the summer of 2018 that an audiotape was circulating that would send shockwaves through the think tanks of Washington and the conservative intellectual movement in particular. A top Google executive had been recorded telling his fellow employees that Google generously donated to conservative think tanks and magazines to dampen criticism of their anti-conservative bias. In essence, Google was buying off Conservatism Inc. and the GOP establishment to stay silent while Google monitored, harassed, and excluded Trump supporters. If true, the tape sounded like a smoking gun: incontrovertible evidence of the corruption and double-dealing of Conservatism Inc....

Did Paul Pelosi, the financier husband of House Speaker Nancy, profit off of insider Beltway scuttlebutt in June to make about $5 million on options contracts tied to Alphabet’s stock? Late on Wednesday evening, Bloomberg News published a report titled “Pelosi’s Husband Locked In $5.3 Million From Alphabet Options,” which carried the subheadlines, “Action was week before House panel considered antitrust bills,” and “Antitrust bills target Alphabet’s Google, Apple, Amazon.” The Bloomberg report followed a Fox Business News piece looking at Pelosi’s June trades, which were laid out in a July 2 disclosure form. Both stories raise a connection between...

Inscription on a jar fragment. ( J. Dye, Austrian Academy of Sciences, courtesy Antiquity Publications Ltd) An alphabetic inscription written on a jar fragment found at the site of Tel Lachish in Israel and dating back around 3,450 years may provide a "missing link" in the history of the alphabet, a team of researchers said. "Dating to the fifteenth century BCE, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant," wrote the researchers led by Felix Höflmayer, an archaeologist at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, in a paper published April 14 in the journal Antiquity. The...

Another public official silenced by the tech giants. YouTube has censored a video of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s March 18 public health roundtable which featured former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas and the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration – an anti-lockdown statement from Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff. During the roundtable, the panelists advised against lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates and warned that these measures were often harmful. They also called for schools to be reopened. The video of the roundtable had accumulated more than 500,000 views and lots of positive...

Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has declined donations from Google and Facebook because of the companies’ censoring of persons and groups with conservative points of view. Outgoing foundation president Kay C. James sent letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai explaining that the Heritage Foundation could “not in good conscience accept money” from companies that suppress conservative speech and content. Heritage turned down a $225,000 donation from Google and returned a $150,000 donation from Facebook in October 2020. James made it clear to the Big Tech companies that her organization is assisting Congress to revise...

Databricks' software helps companies prepare data for analysis and artificial intelligence models.Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2019.Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large sets of data and get it ready for analysis, said Monday it has raised $1 billion in fresh cash, including from a few prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's CapitalG venture arm and Salesforce Ventures all joined in, according to a statement. Microsoft, which invested in Databricks earlier, is also participating in...