Google is all too aware of its fear of being left behind.

Google may be one of the biggest players in artificial intelligence (AI), but one employee says the tech giant’s work in the field is motivated by “absolute panic” about being left behind.

“The AI ​​projects I’ve worked on have been poorly motivated and driven by a panic that as long as they have the word ‘AI’ in their title, they’ll be great,” wrote Scott Jenson, a senior user experience designer who left Google in March, in a post LinkedIn on Monday.

“This myopia is NOT driven by the needs of the user,” he continued. “It’s the absolute fear of being left behind.” Jenson later clarified in an update to his post that he was not a senior Google executive and that the projects he worked on “were quite limited.”

“My comment is more likely driven by general frustration with the entire industry and its approach to AI,” he wrote. According to his LinkedIn profile, Jenson graduated from Stanford University and worked at Google for about 16 years

in three separate periods.

In his first job, which lasted from 2005 to 2011, Jenson led Google’s mobile user experience. He later returned to Google in 2013, where he spent over 8 years developing product strategy. Jenson’s most recent and shortest tenure at Google ran from April 2022 to March 2024, when he explored new uses of haptic technology (which studies the sense of touch to produce haptic responses) for Android.

“The idea is that you’ll have an assistant on your phone, like Tony Stark’s Jarvis, who locks you into its ecosystem so tightly that you will never leave it“Written by Jenson, referring to the Marvel hero Iron Man.

“This vision is pure temptation. The fear is that They can’t let someone else get there first.– he added. And according to Jenson, this isn’t the first time the search giant has succumbed to fear and anxiety when it spots a new competitor.

“The same thing happened 13 years ago with Google+ (I was also present at this fiasco). but before Facebook

— Jenson wrote. Google+ is a social network that the company launched in June 2011. The company’s attempt to compete with Facebook failed due to “low usage and engagement” among users. The service was finally closed in April 2019.

According to Jenson, Google was not the only tech giant to blame for this mistake.

“By the way, Apple is no different. They are also trying to take a real leap in artificial intelligence with Siri. “When the emperor takes off his clothes, he will be surpassed by those who think big,” said Jenson, who also spent eight years as a user interface designer at Apple.

Jenson’s harsh criticism comes as tech giants such as Google and Apple struggle to catch up with artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI. And Google and Apple’s massive investments in artificial intelligence have not given them a significant advantage in the race for leadership in artificial intelligence.

In fact, Apple software bosses They spent weeks testing ChatGPT before realizing they needed to update their Siri digital assistant.in accordance with New York Times. The Cupertino company says it is also close to a deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into the next version of iOS. Bloomberg.

The same goes for Google, which OpenAI has repeatedly outperformed with its latest products. When Google unveiled its new artificial intelligence model Gemini 1.5 on February 15, OpenAI released its text-to-video model Sora just hours later.

Last week, OpenAI unveiled its new flagship artificial intelligence model GPT-4o, a day before Google announced several updates to its models.

“I try not to think too much about competitors, but I can’t stop thinking about the aesthetic difference between OpenAI and Google“Said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a post on Twitter (now X) on May 16th.