Google has made some serious amendments to its AI policy, which could have severe implications around the world.
If you weren’t already worried about headlines saying the end is nigh, Google has been accused of taking the training wheels off artificial intelligence by removing a major policy keeping the ever-advancing tech in line.
There are plenty of warnings out there from so-called ‘Godfathers’ of AI, suggesting that the potential dangers of AI’s applications outweigh the good. Yoshua Bengio has just warned how a military arms race could exploit AI, while Geoffrey Hinton has upgraded early predictions that there’s a 10% chance AI could wipe us out and doubled it to 20%.
While potential what-if scenarios were enough to worry about, Google is arguably making it easier than ever for AI to be used to eradicate the human race.
As spotted by Bloomberg, Google has quietly removed the policy that’s been in place since 2018 – promising to keep AI away from ‘harmful’ applications.
Artificial intelligence is tipped to lead the next world war (mikkelwilliam / Getty)
Google’s AI Principles page previously said it wouldn’t pursue AI applications as “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” This included weapons and surveillance tech which violate “internationally accepted norms.” With the language no longer on the page, there are obvious concerns.
When Bloomberg reached out to Google for a response, it pointed the outlet to a blog post shared on February 4.
The ‘Responsible AI’ post explains: “There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape.”
Google Senior Vice President James Manyika and Demis Hassabis, who leads the AI lab Google DeepMind, wrote: “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality and respect for human rights.
“And we believe that companies, governments and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth and supports national security.”
After having co-led Google’s ethical AI team and now being Chief Ethics Scientist for AI startup Hugging Face, Margaret Mitchell told Bloomberg what the specific removal of the ‘harm’ clause could mean: “Having that removed is erasing the work that so many people in the ethical AI space and the activist space as well had done at Google, and more problematically it means Google will probably now work on deploying technology directly that can kill people.”
There are concerns about Google changing its AI principles (Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty)
The recent emergence of China’s DeepSeek has sparked concerns that OpenAI will rapidly accelerate its own AI without necessarily thinking of the long-term consequences, while others think Google altering its responsible AI principles should be setting off alarm bells. Tracy Pizzo Frey oversaw Responsible AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2022 and concluded with her thoughts: “They asked us to deeply interrogate the work we were doing across each of them.
“And I fundamentally believe this made our products better. Responsible AI is a trust creator. And trust is necessary for success.”
When the AI principles were first put in place in 2018, thousands of Google employees reiterated the company “should not be in the business of war,” but jump forward to 2025 and it feels like we’re nudging closer to the Skynet future of the Terminator movies.
Out of things we humans can predict, we always seem to be a little off with the weather.
Often, the weather forecasts predict sunshine but usually, we end up with clouds and a high chance of rain, especially if you live in the north.
However, Google might have solved this problem with, you guessed it, AI. Not to mention, a cheaper option too.
The tech giant’s new development, called Scalable Ensemble Envelope Diffusion Sampler, or just SEEDS, can help forecast weather.
SEEDS works similarly to well-known language models like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Google has already been studying the model, in which it can generate a vast number of weather forecasts in a short amount of time.
In turn, researchers of the Alphabet-owned company can analyse a broader range of weather outcomes – from hurricanes to heat waves.
Jason Webber Photography / Getty
More importantly, it could give them a more detailed view of potentially hazardous events to come.
How does it work?
Basically, SEEDS uses weather data like air pressure and atmospheric energy to build predictive forecast models. It examines the relationships between these variables to refine the accuracy of current weather forecasts.
“Our Scalable Ensemble Envelope Diffusion Sampler can generate an arbitrarily large ensemble conditioned on as few as one or two forecasts from an operational NWP system,” the findings from Google’s study reads.
“Accurate weather forecasts can have a direct impact on people’s lives, from helping make routine decisions,” Google added.
“The importance of accurate and timely weather forecasts will only increase as the climate changes.
“Recognising this, we at Google have been investing in weather and climate research to help ensure that the forecasting technology of tomorrow can meet the demand for reliable weather information.”
Physics-based predictions used by weather services today collect various measurements and give a final prediction based on all the variables.
This means they’re accurate enough for common conditions like mild weather, but generating enough forecast models to find the likelihood of extreme weather is not possible.
SEEDS could potentially capture rare events that current models might miss. Not only that, they could predict weather catastrophes and put a warning out to the public of incoming ‘hazardous’ weather.
“This technology opens up novel opportunities for weather and climate science, and it represents one of the first applications to weather and climate forecasting of probabilistic diffusion models,” Google explained.
Google is reportedly considering whether it should change its core search business model to start charging for the option of “premium” results.
These results would integrate AI tools more fully and would be different from core search results, which would apparently be unchanged and still available to everyone for free.
It’s not so much that Google is looking to gate certain AI features behind a paywall, but rather that it’s trying to figure out which of its AI features should be limited to those who pay for its memberships, like Google One.
Google is reportedly considering whether it should change its core search business model to start charging for the option of “premium” results/ SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty
The move has been reported by the Financial Times, which says that at least three sources have confirmed the discussions.
While some features are reserved for subscribers, including AI tools while using Google Docs and more, this would arguably be the first time that it locked a new core product behind a subscription.
When Sky News reached out to Google, a spokesperson said: “We’re not working on or considering an ad-free search experience. As we’ve done many times before, we’ll continue to build new premium capabilities and services to enhance our subscription offerings across Google.”
It rebuts a question that has been picking up steam in the last year or so about the search experience.
Adverts have always been how Google funded its search engine, but plenty of critics feel that search results are now too suffused with these ads, making it harder to sift through to find genuinely helpful or relevant web pages.
Dilara Irem Sancar/Anadolu via Getty Images
The challenge for Google, it would seem, is finding a way to preserve its massive advertising revenue while using AI. For example, when it serves up an “AI-powered snapshot” summarising results, as it’s been testing, this result costs it more to generate than a standard one, thanks to the AI processes required.
So, if users also don’t scroll as far down the page or click onto a website using Google’s own ad-hosting platform, having read the generative text summary without any issue, that presents a small problem for Google of its own making.
Plenty of website owners are also concerned that this could starve them of traffic fairly immediately, so it all adds up to what looks like a pretty significant quandary for the giant search engine.
With additional concerns about reliability and the risk of either misinformation or offensive results being generated by AI, there’s a lot to ponder for executives right now.
As promised, Google is turning off support for a few of its legacy gadgets next week, sparking up a conversation about obsolete tech.
The three devices in question are pretty old, and Google became their owner when it bought Nest and Dropcam in 2014, as part of its push into the world of smart home technology.
Nest reportedly cost Google some $3.2 billion, while Dropcam was believed to be smaller at $555 million, but both were pretty major acquisitions.
Getty/ SOPA Images / Contributor
Now, the Dropcam and Dropcam Pro cameras will stop working, along with Nest Secure, which was an alarm system.
These devices had all been tied into the Nest app for a few years now, but Google announced a year ago that they’d stop working on 8 April 2024.
That day is now nearly upon us, and Google has reiterated that there’s been no change in plan, so when that day arrives the devices will stop being able to record footage or monitor for intrusions.
The reality is that the Dropcam, for example, has been in some people’s homes for more than 10 years, and hasn’t been available to buy for a long while, making it technically obsolete.
However, despite the arrival of newer cameras and products, it’s been working fine for more than a decade, and if you had one or more monitoring parts of your home, there might be no real need to upgrade.
So, this change seemingly doesn’t come as a result of technical failure, but rather because Google has decided to move its support on to more recent hardware.
Smart home technology has a spotty track record when it comes to obsolescence so far, with the number of buyouts and acquisitions that have resulted in defunct hardware slowly growing over time.
Any hardware that relies on a cloud service to function could be at risk of getting bricked if that cloud service ends for any reason, which is the downside to the convenience of a connected cloud-based home security system.
While some names in the space now provide guarantees about the length of service that they’ll give for a piece of hardware you buy, it’s ironic that a disconnected old-school CCTV system could, in some ways, be more reliable than these newer and fancier networks.
Google hosted its annual I/O conference this week, a big meet-up with developers where it spills the beans on all the major software updates it’s working on – and releases a whole bunch of them for the first time.
This year, unsurprisingly, it was all about artificial intelligence (AI) as Google demonstrated just how thoroughly it plans to integrate AI into its many, many programs as time goes on.
This means some of the apps you’re used to are going to change, and Gmail is one of the major candidates.
Google showed off what it calls the Side Panel Assistant, a new AI panel that can pop up on the right-hand side of your Gmail tab, a dialogue box that you can basically use however you like.
You can type in requests, whether that’s asking for a summary of a long thread you don’t have time to read, or a quick draft of an important message you need to send.
GLENN CHAPMAN / Contributor / Getty
The system hooks into Google’s chatbot, Gemini, and means that you can also ask questions like requesting a summary of the shipping status of anything you’ve bought recently, and more.
It looks like this could pretty much change how many people use their email inbox, even if it’s arguably just building in tools you can get from other sources like ChatGPT if you want.
It’s not just Gmail, though – Google’s core business of Search is changing in a massive way. It’s been teasing for a couple of years now the advent of ‘AI Overviews’ in search results that can answer questions without you ever needing to visit a webpage.
Now, those summaries are rolling out to everyone in the US in Google Search – and right now there’s no way to actually opt out.
So, when you search certain terms (and there’s no definitive list), you’ll start to see these summaries at the top of the results page, as Google’s AI model tries to aggregate an answer for you from web sources.
SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty
This is causing real consternation in some circles already – website owners are concerned that this will result in fewer people actually clicking through to read their pages, for one, although Google claims that AI summaries result in more through traffic.
In fact, there are now so many additions to Google Search that Google has at least made one small change, for those who want a purer experience. You can now find a new drop-down button when searching, under the ‘More’ button on a results page – the ‘Web’ option.
This will remove all the new cards and suggestions that Google has added over the years, returning you to a simple web search without any frills, and some are already saying that it might be the best way to get clean results.
