Clear love and hate, Google employees watch the I/O conference: praise engineers, roast that senior executives only repeatedly emphasize AI

On May 15th, Google held its annual I/O developer conference last week, showcasing the company's latest artificial intelligence technology achievements. According to internal sources, many Google employees believe that engineers have played a greater role in the sharp rise in the company's stock price, while executives only "repeatedly emphasize artificial intelligence", which has caused ridicule from employees

On May 15th, Google held its annual I/O developer conference last week, showcasing the company's latest artificial intelligence technology achievements. According to internal sources, many Google employees believe that engineers have played a greater role in the sharp rise in the company's stock price, while executives only "repeatedly emphasize artificial intelligence", which has caused ridicule from employees.

The following is the translation content:

Last week, Google employees were very concerned about the company's annual developer conference and Wall Street's positive response to it.

After the I/O conference, the company's stock price increased by 4.3%. From internal communication, it can be seen that many employees tend to attribute credit to the company's engineers, believing that they are the main contributors rather than executives.

On Google's internal website Memegen, an emoticon pack that compares the stock price of its parent company Alphabet is the most popular, receiving thousands of likes. On the left side of the picture is a chart of the company's stock price decline, which reads "executives cutting costs and repurchasing stocks". On the right is a chart of the company's stock price rise, which reads: "Engineers have completed their work

Many employees praise their colleagues in the comment section, believing that with the efforts of the entire company, engineers have produced products that meet expectations and are ready to face the critical moment of artificial intelligence competition.

Not long ago, Google employees fiercely criticized CEO Sandar Pichai. They believe that despite the company's layoffs and cost cuts, Pichai also received over $200 million in stock rewards last year. They also criticized the company for authorizing a $70 billion stock buyback.

Last Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a new universal large language model called PaLM2, and made a series of progress in improving artificial intelligence technology for search engines. Subsequently, the stock price of Google's parent company Alphabet jumped to its highest level since August last year, with a cumulative increase of 11% that week.

Since OpenAI publicly released the artificial intelligence chat robot ChatGPT at the end of last year, Google has been under tremendous pressure in terms of generative artificial intelligence technology. As a supporter of OpenAI, Microsoft has embedded new technologies based on the large language model GPT into Bing search engines and other products. This worries people that Google may not have many days to dominate its core business search engine field.

In February of this year, Google hastily promoted the artificial intelligence chat robot Bard at an event, resulting in a 7% drop in the company's stock price. Google employees responded that Pichai's statement was "hasty" and "clumsy".

Since then, Google has been wanting to quickly push consumer grade services in the field of artificial intelligence to the market.

After the Google I/O Developer Conference, employees were very impressed with some of Bard's updates, such as dark mode, which is an option that engineers really like. After Google announced this feature, there was enthusiastic applause from the crowd.

One of the emoticons received hundreds of likes, which read "I have learned a lot from I/O", "Google can still leave a deep impression on me." "Those hardworking people do well," and "As someone who has always wanted to create satirical emoticons, I am glad to be amazed

In another emoticon pack, Google employees praised Dave Burke, Vice President of Engineering, for his speech at the Android 14 press conference, stating that his presentation on stage was very realistic, rather than typical promotional clich s.

But in the two-hour keynote speech at the Google I/O Developer Conference, employees mocked executives for frequently using the term artificial intelligence. One of the very popular emoticons is a cartoon character with a caption saying, "The 2023 I/O Developer Conference raised Google's stock price," followed by, "I've been talking about artificial intelligence, and it's been rising

Another meme says, 'Let's sprinkle some more artificial intelligence/machine learning on top of it,' and displays a pile of powder with the words' Google 2023 I/O Developer Conference 'written on it.

Other employees choose to use songs or movie characters to mock the CEO of the company, Pichai, claiming that he has been repeatedly using the term artificial intelligence at the conference.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Last year, Alphabet's stock price fell by nearly 40%. But it has increased by 33% so far this year. (Chen Chen)