Google Walks Tightrope on AI in Search Antitrust Trial

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Google executives downplayed the company's artificial intelligence position during testimony at a landmark federal antitrust trial, saying the Alphabet Inc. company has tried to be slow and cautious because of the dangerous power of the technology.

The Department of Justice has a different theory: That Google was way ahead in generative AI and chose not to release the technology sooner for fear of losing its monopoly in search. The fact that Google could move so quickly to debut its AI tools once Microsoft Corp. entered the race shows that the company was holding back innovation, the DOJ claims.

To win the case, the DOJ needs to demonstrate some harm to consumers — and proving that Google intentionally delayed technological progress is one way the government could do it. Similar arguments worked in the case to break up AT&T in the 1980s. 

Over the past few days in Washington, the Justice Department has tried to demonstrate, through witness testimony and documents, that Google long possessed the talent and the technological capacity to move forward with generative AI search — tech that attempts to answer queries given simple user prompts.

Google argues that its delay was the right thing to do — not to maintain its monopoly, but out of its concern for societal harm.

“Our sense was it was not quite yet responsible to put that technology out in front of users because of concerns about factuality and toxicity,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president and the company's search boss, testified in court last week. “We were keeping it behind the covers, but were gradually developing it.”

Raghavan's rhetoric contradicts Google's public statements about its prowess and mastery of AI in virtually every other setting — during