Why the Google Expansion is Going Violent? The Case of David Pichai Against Google in the DoJ’s Investigation of Artificial Intelligence

The reason for the lawsuit is to try to force Google to hand over all its data in order to end its advantage in search. In addition to building a huge amount of data, money, and search quality, the company has spent billions of dollars on prime placement and default status around the world. Google calls this the “virtuous” cycle of search; the government calls it “vicious” and says it needs to be disrupted.

A number of newly developed chatbots are reaching tens of thousands of users each day, according to Pichai. Pichai said Google views its AI chatbot, Gemini, as a leading model in the industry, but still a “big gap” remains between them and what he views as the market leader: OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Pichai was asked how he sees the use of artificial intelligence disrupting search in a few years. The way artificial intelligence will evolve will be profound, Pichai replied, and it will deeply transform the way that search is done.

When he took the helm of the company he ordered them to become Artificial Intelligence first and invest deeply in this technology because he believed that people are not just looking at the internet, but want to get things done. AI can do that, he said.

“AI is one of the most profound technologies humans will ever work on,” Pichai said. He testified that Google has spent roughly $49 billion on AI research and development and is considered one of the top two or three companies in the world spending in this space.

He called the DOJ’s proposal “so far reaching, so extraordinary” that it feels as though the government is asking for a sell-off of the company’s core intellectual property. He said it’s unclear how Google could go on to fund innovation if its work is to be given away at marginal cost.

closing arguments are expected to take place at the end of May, as Google’s attorneys are expected to call witnesses through next week. Mehta is expected to make a decision by August.

The DOJ has questioned whether or notGoogle can take care of its users experience and privacy. (It’s mostly a tactic to force Google to say, no, of course not, over and over again.) But Pichai took issue with Veronica Onyema from the DOJ when she asked whether another company could manage Chrome’s security and privacy as well as Google. He said that no other company makes the kind of investments in the web that the company makes with its own products. He worried about the future of the world’s most popular browser, if anyone wanted to buy it, even though he wasn’t sure who would buy it.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in 2020 against the company over the way it made its search engine the default on new phones. The DOJ believes that this unfairly boxed out rivals and they want Mehta to rule that there must be a change in policy on payment for exclusive default placements.

Pichai’s testimony was Google’s argument in a nutshell. The company has held throughout this case that it has been successful not because of monopolistic actions but because it out-invested its competitors and simply built the best product. The government wants to take the labors of its employees and give them to anyone that asks, according to Google.

If Google were required to allow other companies to build exact copies of Google’s search experience, while also giving them access to how the tech works, Pichai said more than once he wasn’t sure how to justify continuing to invest so heavily in search. “It’s not clear to me how to fund all the innovation we do,” he told Schmidtlein, “if we were to give all of it away at marginal cost.”

They can use databases like these to train large language models, like chatbots, so that they can generate human-like responses and engage in conversations.

Google is the only company that cares about what it does, and if so, what it tells us about its search engine and what Apple can do to protect it

Google spent over a billion dollars on Chrome in just the last year, Pichai said, and tens of billions in the last decade. He pointed out that many browsers run on the open-source Chromium infrastructure, and thatgoogle is responsible for more than ninety percent of its code commits. Other companies can build browsers, Pichai said, “but no one has shown a commitment to the level of investment we put in.”

This trial was decided on the deals GOOGLE makes for search placement as well as the relationship it has with Apple. Pichai argued that Google should be allowed to continue paying for placement, as long as its deals are not exclusive. Google has already begun changing its deals to that effect, including with Apple: Onyema asked Pichai to confirm that Google seeks to have a deal done to make Gemini one of multiple options in Apple Intelligence by “the middle of this year,” and a product out in market soon after, and Pichai said yes to both. Since Apple Intelligence already integrates ChatGPT, this would be exactly the kind of multi-provider deal Google didn’t allow before.

The DOJ says, well, yes — that’s the only way to level the playing field. Pichai’s obvious goal was to convince Mehta that the proposed changes wouldn’t just prop up competitors, but would also make it impossible for Google to continue being an innovative company. If we were required to share our intellectual property, it was not clear to me how we would have any value for it.