Google's parent company Alphabet is reportedly laying off dozens of employees in a secret division that develops new technology as part of the search giant's broader cost-cutting drive.
In recent months, the unit, known as X Lab, has been in talks with venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms to raise money, according to people familiar with the matter. bloomberg.
One of the people told Bloomberg that if X Lab could raise outside funding, it would be easier for the X Lab project to spin out and function as an independent startup with backing from Alphabet and other investors. It is said that it will become like this.
The Innovation Lab has worked on high-tech projects like Wing, which consists of delivery drones. Loom, the balloon internet network. Makani is a kite that generates wind energy.
A spokesperson for the department told Reuters: “Company X is tackling global challenges such as climate change and connectivity and is continually looking for ways to streamline the way we deliver moonshots.” he said.
The move comes days after Google announced it would lay off hundreds of employees across its advertising sales team and hardware, voice assistant, and augmented reality teams as part of an aggressive campaign to cut costs and improve efficiency.
Few of X's projects have developed into durable businesses, Bloomberg reported. Perhaps the most widely known of its efforts is Waymo, a self-driving car collective that stands for “advancing mobility.”
“We are expanding our approach to focus on spinning out more projects as independent companies funded through market-based capital,” Astro Teller, who heads X, said in an email. .
“We will achieve this by expanding our reach to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to focus on lean teams and capital efficiency,” Teller added, according to Bloomberg.
As part of the restructuring, Company X will lay off dozens of employees, Bloomberg reported, although it was not immediately clear how many positions would be affected by the cuts.
A person familiar with the layoffs told Bloomberg that the cuts are focused on support staff.
Representatives from X Lab did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.
Described as a “semi-secret research and development facility,” X Lab was founded in 2010 by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
In recent years, the institute, based at Google's Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has faced pressure to turn speculative projects into profitable businesses as Alphabet looks to wind down its operations. It became known as X. It costs more overall.
So far this month, Google has already confirmed layoffs in multiple regions of the company. This includes hundreds of layoffs in the advertising sales team and more than 1,000 employees in other departments, including the core engineering team and the hardware division responsible for things like devices. Like Pixel, Nest, Fitbit.
The layoffs are a tough start to the year for Google employees. The workforce was reduced by more than 12,000 people through 2023.
Unsurprisingly, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai listed “permanent cost reductions” among the tech giant's key goals for 2024.
Pichai hinted at even closer planning as part of a list Google shared with employees last Thursday titled “2024 Company-wide OKRs” (objective key results).
According to the copy, one of the seven goals is to “improve the company's speed, efficiency, and productivity and achieve lasting cost savings.” Get it on Verge.
The goal at the top of Google's list was “Delivering the world's most advanced, secure, and responsible AI.” The memo also mentioned driving innovation through Google Cloud services and building “the most useful personal computing platforms and devices.”
The memo expands on a company-wide memo Pichai sent out the night before, headlined “2024 priorities and the year ahead,” pending further layoffs. It suggests that.
“We have ambitious goals and will invest in big priorities this year,” he said, presumably referring to the artificial intelligence race. CNBC.
The memo comes a month after Google introduced Gemini, its most advanced AI model, which is said to be “capable of more specific inferences.”
“The reality is that we will have to make tough choices to create the capacity for this investment,” Pichai wrote, adding that the memo says this is a move some teams are making to “simplify execution and increase velocity.” “Delete the layer to remove the layer.''
Pichai said the impending “role reductions will not be on the scale of last year's reductions and will not affect all teams.” However, he added, “Frankly, some teams will continue to make resource allocation decisions,” he added, according to CNBC.
