Here's why the creator of Gmail thinks Google fell behind in the AI arms race

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By clicking “Sign Up”, you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . You can opt-out at any time by visiting our Preferences page or by clicking "unsubscribe" at the bottom of the email. Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. download the app Sign up to get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in markets, tech, and business — delivered daily. Read preview Google should be dominating the AI arms race — right? When Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, launched the company in 1998, they envisioned it as an AI company, Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said on a recent episode of the Y Combinator Startup podcast. Over the years, it gathered the building blocks to do so: volumes of data, high-level talent, and computational resources. This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. But Google's AI rollouts have been anything but groundbreaking. Its new AI search feature, AI Overviews, promised to deliver neat, AI-generated summaries with Google search results. Within days of its release in May, though, it was generating strange responses, like telling users to put glue on pizza. The company also lost $100 billion in market value in a single day in April when its then ChatGPT competitor, Bard, spit out a wrong answer during a demonstration. Advertisement Buchheit — who is also credited with coming up with Google's original motto, "Don't be evil" — thinks Google may have lost its way when it reorganized under its new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015. The founders stepped back, and CEO Sundar Pichai took the helm. That's when its focus shifted to preserving its monopoly over search, Buchheit said. "They have, you know, this gold mine, like search is just so valuable," he said. Meanwhile, "AI is an inherently disruptive technology." Related stories When you directly answer queries from users — the way a chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT might — you disincentivize them from clicking on ads, he explained. "A search company has an inherent tension between profitability and giving the right answers because there's always a temptation that if you make your results worse, people will actually click on more ads," Buchheit said. Advertisement That's not just Buchheit's analysis; it's something Page and Brin noted in their seminal 1998 paper introducing Google. They said search engine technology has been "largely a black art" and "advertising-oriented." With Google, however, their goal was to "provide high-quality search results over a rapidly growing World Wide Web."