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Google's AI focus shifted after reorganizing under Alphabet in 2015, the creator of Gmail says. The shift prioritized search monopoly over AI innovation, impacting Google's edge.

Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said Google shifted priority once founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back.

The company also lost $100 billion in market value in a single day in April when its then ChatGPT competitor, Bard, spit out a wrong answer during a demonstration. "A search company has an inherent tension between profitability and giving the right answers because there's always a temptation that if you make your results worse, people will actually click on more ads," Buchheit said. With Google, however, their goal was to "provide high-quality search results over a rapidly growing World Wide Web."

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