Washington Post: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken steps to place Google under formal federal supervision, an extraordinary move that could subject the technology giant to the regular inspections and other rigorous monitoring that the government imposes on major banks.

Google has fiercely resisted the idea over months of highly secretive talks, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them -- setting up what may ultimately be a major legal clash with vast implications for the CFPB's powers in the digital age.

The exact scope of the CFPB's concerns is not clear, and its order does not appear to be final. The political fate of the bureau's work under Director Rohit Chopra is also in doubt, as the watchdog agency braces for potentially significant changes to its leadership and agenda with the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House.

Formed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has broad powers to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or predatory financial practices. That includes the ability to place certain firms under supervision, a status that can afford regulators direct access to the company's internal records to ensure their activities are sound -- and seek fixes if they are not.

Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software.

I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could.

I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday.

Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years.

As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music.

How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:

- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.

Qwant, France's privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index. TechCrunch: The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines -- including and especially around generative AI -- as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing's search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google's search results. Rising API costs are one clear motivator for the move to shrink this Big Tech dependency, with Microsoft massively hiking prices for Bing's search APIs last year.

Neither Ecosia nor Qwant will stop using Bing or Google altogether. However, they aim to diversify the core tech supporting their services with their own index. It will lower their operational costs, and serve as a technical base to fuel their own product development as GenAI technologies take up a more central role in many consumer-facing digital services. Both search engines have already dabbled in integrating GenAI features. Expect more on this front, although they aren't planning to develop AI model development themselves. They say they will continue to rely on API access to major platforms' large language models (LLMs) to power these additions. The pair is also open to other European firms joining in with their push for more tech stack sovereignty -- at least as fellow customers for the search index, as they plan to license access via an API. Other forms of partnership could be considered too, they told TechCrunch.

Google will require all new mobile chipsets launching with Android 15 to support its Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a significant shift in the operating system's security architecture. The mandate, reports AndroidAuthority that got a hold of Android's latest Vendor Software Requirements document, affects major chipmakers including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung's Exynos division. New processors like the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 must implement AVF support to receive Android certification.

AVF, introduced with Android 13, creates isolated environments for security-sensitive operations including code compilation and DRM applications. The framework also enables full operating system virtualization, with Google demonstrating Chrome OS running in a virtual machine on Android devices.

Google's head of research Yossi Matias maintains that learning to code remains "as important as ever" despite AI's growing role in software development. While AI tools have reduced coding time for some developers -- and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noting that AI now generates a quarter of all code, Matias stressed that human engineers still review and approve AI-generated code.

The Google executive, who also serves as a company VP, acknowledged that junior professionals have faced challenges gaining experience as AI handles entry-level tasks. Google has launched initiatives to support early-career employees through this transition. Matias compared coding literacy to basic mathematics, arguing it provides crucial understanding of technology regardless of career path.

Renew Home says they're building a "virtual power plant" in Texas by "enabling homes to easily reduce and shift the timing of energy use." Thursday they announced a 10-year project distributing hundreds of thousands of smart thermostats to customers of Texas-based power utility NRG Energy, starting next spring. (Bloomberg calls them "AI-enabled thermostats that use Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud technology.") The ultimate goal? "Create a nearly 1-gigawatt, AI-powered virtual power plant" — equivalent to 1.9 million solar panels, enough to power about 200,000 homes during peak demand.

One NRG executive touted the move as "cutting-edge, AI-driven solutions that will bolster grid resilience and contribute to a more sustainable future." [Residential virtual power plants] work by aggregating numerous, small-scale distributed energy resources like HVAC systems controlled by smart thermostats and home batteries and coordinating them to balance supply and demand... NRG, in partnership with Renew Home, plans to offer Vivint and Nest smart thermostats, including professional installation, at no cost to eligible customers across NRG's retail electricity providers and plans. These advanced thermostats make subtle automatic HVAC adjustments to help customers shift their energy use to times when electricity is less constrained, less expensive, and cleaner... Over time, the parties expect to add devices like batteries and electric vehicles to the virtual power plant, expanding energy savings opportunities for customers...

Through the use of Google Cloud's data, analytics, and AI technology, NRG will be able to do things like better predict weather conditions, forecast wind and solar generation output, and create predictive pricing models, allowing for more efficient production and ultimately ensuring the home energy experience is seamless for customers.
Google Cloud will also offer "its AI and machine learning to determine the best time to cool or heat homes," reports Bloomberg, "based on a household's energy usage patterns and ambient temperatures."

It was less than a year ago that Renew Home was formed when Google spun off the load-shifting service for its "Google Nest" thermostats, which merged with load-shift management startup OhmConnect. Bloomberg describes this week's announcement as "Three of the biggest names in US home energy automation... coming together to offer some relief to the beleaguered Texas electrical grid."

But they point out that 1 gigawatt is roughly 1% of the record summer demand seen in Texas this year. Still, "The entire industry has been built to serve the peak load on the hottest day of the year," said Rasesh Patel, president of NRG's consumer unit. "This allows us to be a lot more smarter about demand in shaving the peak."

Nathan Sobo "joined GitHub in late 2011 to build the Atom text editor," according to an online biography, "and he led the Atom team until 2018." Max Brunsfeld joined the Atom team in 2013, and "While driving Atom towards its 1.0 launch during the day, Max spent nights and weekends building Tree-sitter, a blazing-fast and expressive incremental parsing framework that currently powers all code analysis at GitHub."

Last year they teamed up with Antonio Scandurra (another Atom alumnus) to launch a new startup called Zed (which in 2023 raised $10 million, according to TechCrunch). And today the open source blog It's FOSS checks in on their open-source code editor — "Zed Editor". Mainly written in Rust, it supports running in CLI, diagnosing project-wide errors, split panes, and markdown previews: By default, any added content is treated as plain text. I used the language switcher to change it to Rust so that I would get proper syntax highlighting, indentation, error detection, and other useful language-specific functions. The switch highlighted all the Rust elements correctly, and I then focused on Zed Editor's user interface. The overall feel of the editor was minimal, with all the important options being laid out nicely.

[Its status bar] had some interesting panels. The first one I checked was the Terminal Panel, which, as the name suggests, lets you run commands, scripts, and facilitates interaction with system files or processes directly from within the editor. I then moved to the Assistant Panel, which is home to various large language models that can be integrated into Zed Editor. There are options like Anthropic, GitHub Copilot Chat, Ollama, OpenAI, and Google AI... The Zed Editor team has also recently introduced Zed AI in collaboration with Anthropic for assisting with coding, allowing for code generation, advanced context-powered interactions, and more...

The real-time collaboration features on Zed Editor are quite appealing too. To check them out, I had to log in with my GitHub account. After logging in, the Collab Panel opened up, and I could see many channels from the official Zed community. I could chat with others, add collaborators to existing projects, join a call with the option to share my screen and track other collaborators' cursors, add new contacts, and carry out many other collaborative tasks.

One can also use extensions and themes to extend what Zed Editor can do. There are some nice pre-installed themes as well.

"The Rust trademark policy has been updated and a new draft is available to view," announced the Rust Foundation this week.

The last proposed trademark policy (in April of 2023) was criticized by open source advocate Bruce Perens in The Register as "far awry of fair use which is legally permitted." The Rust Foundation says this new version has "incorporated a number of suggestions from the Rust community," in a blog post that summarizes the feedback and enumerates specific ways it's been addressed: 1. We primarily plan to lean on community reports for enforcement and have no intention of spending our limited resources policing the work of small creators.

2. We have removed the non-legal language summary and instead have clarified wording throughout as best we can while keeping the policy valid.

3. The Rust trademark does not cover use of the word "Rust" in general and instead pertains to its use in relevant technical settings.

4. We have updated the logo usage policy. Color modifications are allowed.

5. The non-endorsement rule is about managing perception of official affiliation with the Foundation and Rust Project, and is thus subjective.

6. We removed restrictions on the use of "Rust" and "Cargo" in package names. The crates prefixes "rust-" and "cargo-" are no longer reserved to the Rust Project.

7. We will usually allow the community to use the marks on limited merchandise (more details in the updated draft)....

[T]he central purpose of these updates is to empower all Rustaceans to engage with the Rust language ecosystem more confidently. As a final step in this process, we invite you to review the updated policy and share any blocking concerns you might have... Thank you to everyone who weighed in with helpful suggestions on the initial trademark policy draft we shared. The level of engagement and passion within the Rust community is inspiring to all of us at the Rust Foundation.
The tech news site Heise Online writes "It is noticeable that the language is much clearer and dispenses with a lot of legal jargon," in a piece which argues the new draft "should calm the waves and create clarity." The new draft is not only formulated more simply, but is also significantly shorter. Some restrictions have been softened in the new rules or have disappeared completely...

Meanwhile, the Foundation has also adapted its logo so that it is clear which logo stands for the programming language and which for the Foundation. The use of the name Rust is explicitly permitted to identify projects that are either written in the programming language or are compatible with it...

Before the new trademark rules come into force, the Rust Foundation is collecting feedback on the current draft. The web form is open until November 20, 2024.

This week Discover magazine looks at evidence — both old and new — for a ninth planet in our solar system: "Orbits of the most distant small bodies — comets or asteroids — seem to be clustered on one half or one side of the solar system," says Amir Siraj [an astrophysicist with Princeton University]. "That's very weird and something that can't be explained by our current understanding of the solar system." A 2014 study in Nature first noted these orbits. A 2021 study in The Astronomical Journal examined the clustering in the orbit and concluded that "Planet Nine" was likely closer and brighter than expected.

Astrophysicists don't agree whether the clustering in the orbit is a real effect. Some have argued it is biased because the view that scientists currently have is limited, Siraj says. "This debate for the last decade has a lot of scientists confused, including myself. I decided to look at the problem from scratch," he says.

In a 2024 paper, Siraj and his co-authors ran simulations of the solar system, including an extra planet beyond Neptune. "We did it 300 times, about 2.5 times more than what was done previously," Siraj says. "In each simulation, you try different parameters for the extra planet. A different mass, a different tilt, a different shape of the orbit. You run these for millions of years, and then you compare the distribution to what we see in our solar system...." They found that the perimeters for this possible planet were different than what has been previously discussed in the scientific literature, and they supported the possibility of an unseen planet beyond Neptune.

Scientists hope a new telescope will have the potential to see deeper into the solar system. In 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón — a mountain in Chile, is expected to go online. The observatory boasts that in the time it takes a person to open up their phone and pose for a selfie, their new telescope will be able to snap an image of 100,000 galaxies, many of which have never been seen by scientists. The telescope will have the largest digital camera ever built, the LSST. Siraj says he expects it will take "the deepest, all-sky survey that humanity has ever conducted." So, what might the Rubin Observatory find past Neptune? Based on the current literature, Siraj sees a few possibilities. One is that the Rubin Observatory, with its increased capabilities, might be able to see a planet beyond Neptune... "Next year is going to be an enormous year for solar system science," he says.
NASA points out that the Hawaii-based Keck and Subaru telescopes are also searching for Planet X, while "a NASA-funded citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, encourages the public to help search using images captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

And starting next year the Rubin observatory will also "search for more Kuiper Belt objects. If the orbits of these objects are systematically aligned with each other, it may give more evidence for the existence of Planet X (Planet Nine), or at least help astronomers know where to search for it.

"Another possibility is that Planet X (Planet Nine) does not exist at all. Some researchers suggest the unusual orbit of those Kuiper Belt objects can be explained by their random distribution."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tablizer for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Digital Trends: A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools - and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from [web analytics company] Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth... Google's Chrome browser has a solid market share of 35.4 billion users in 2024. It has seen minimal growth YoY but has grown 45.35% in the last 5 years, according to Statscounter.
The article notes ChatGPT saw a jump in traffic when it changed its dowmain from chat.openai.com to just chatgpt.com -- and that OpenAI recently purchased the domain Chat.com (though "there is no word on what the company plans to do...") Meanwhile, other AI tools continue to see traffic and growth, despite not being at the same level as ChatGPT. Despite recent plagiarism claims, the Perplexity chatbot has seen 90.8 million visits in October, a 25.5% MoM growth and 199.2% YoY growth. Google's Gemini Chatbot saw 291.6 million visits in October, a 6.2% MoM growth and 19% YoY growth after the company introduced a new ChromeOS update that brought new AI features to its Chromebooks. Anthropic's Claude chatbot has seen 84.1 million visits in October, a 25.5% MoM growth and 394.9% YoY growth, after recently rolling out a desktop application for Windows and macOS. Microsoft's web-based Copilot website saw 69.4 million visits in October, an 87.6% MoM growth.

Google is generally rolling out its Gemini AI-powered Vids app that lets you create video presentations using a prompt. From a report: Some of Vids' key features include letting Gemini auto-insert stock footage for you, generating a script, and making AI voiceovers so you don't have to speak. Google advertises that the tool can help turn customer support articles into videos, make training videos, share company announcements, create meeting recaps, and more. Vids will be available by default for Workspace organizations with access, but Google notes possible usage limits may apply to features like "Help me create" and AI voiceovers starting in 2026.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Verge: It's been two long years since the launch of Matter -- the one smart home standard designed to rule them all -- and there's been a fair amount of disappointment around a sometimes buggy rollout, slow adoption by companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, and frustrating setup experiences. However, the launch of the Matter 1.4 specification this week shows some signs that the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, the organization behind Matter) is using more sticks and fewer carrots to get the smart home industry coalition to cooperate.

The new spec introduces 'enhanced multi-admin,' an improvement on multi-admin -- the much-touted interoperability feature that means your Matter smart light can work in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. It brings a solution for making Thread border routers from different companies play nicely together and introduces a potentially easier way to add Matter infrastructure to homes through Wi-Fi routers and access points. Matter 1.4 also brings some big updates to energy management support, including adding heat pumps, home batteries, and solar panels as Matter device types.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims. On X, former Google co-head of AI ethics Timnit Gebru wrote of Anthropic's new deal with Palantir, "Look at how they care so much about 'existential risks to humanity.'"

The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department. In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation.

While the partnership announcement suggests broad potential for AI-powered intelligence analysis, it states that human officials will retain their decision-making authority in these operations. As a reference point for the technology's capabilities, Palantir reported that one (unnamed) American insurance company used 78 AI agents powered by their platform and Claude to reduce an underwriting process from two weeks to three hours. The new collaboration builds on Anthropic's earlier integration of Claude into AWS GovCloud, a service built for government cloud computing. Anthropic, which recently began operations in Europe, has been seeking funding at a valuation up to $40 billion. The company has raised $7.6 billion, with Amazon as its primary investor.

I had the opportunity to interview esteemed programmer Steve Yegge for the SourceForge Podcast to ask him all about AI-powered coding assistants and the future of programming. "We're moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you're just having a conversation with it about the code," said Yegge. "That is much more accessible to people who are just getting into the industry."

Steve has nearly 30 years of programming experience working at Geoworks, Amazon, Google, Grab and now SourceGraph, working to build out the Cody AI assistant platform. Here's his Wikipedia page. He's not shy about sharing his opinions or predictions for the industry, no matter how difficult it may be for some to hear. "I'm going to make the claim that ... line-oriented programming, which we've done for the last 40, 50 years, ... is going away. It is dying just like assembly language did, and it will be completely dead within five years."

You can watch the episode on YouTube and stream on all major podcast platforms. A transcription of the podcast is available here.

AI startup Perplexity demonstrated strong performance in real-time during Tuesday election coverage, while rivals failed by predicting wrong outcomes before polls closed, marking the first major test of AI systems in U.S. election reporting, TechCrunch reports.

Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.

The UK will bring in legislation to safeguard against the risks of AI in the next year, technology secretary Peter Kyle has said, as he pledged to invest in the infrastructure that will underpin the sector's growth. From a report: Kyle told the Financial Times' Future of AI summit on Wednesday that Britain's voluntary agreement on AI testing was "working, it's a good code" but that the long-awaited AI bill would be focused on making such accords with leading developers legally binding. The legislation, which Kyle said would be presented to MPs in the current parliament, will also turn the UK's AI Safety Institute into an arms-length government body, giving it "the independence to act fully in the interests of British citizens."

At present, the body is a directorate of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. At the UK-organised AI safety summit last November, companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed a "landmark" but non-binding agreement allowing partner governments to test their forthcoming large language models for risks and vulnerabilities before they were released to consumers. Kyle said that while he was "not fatalistic" about advancements in AI, "citizens need to know that we are mitigating the potential risks."

A federal judge in California has dismissed most claims in a class-action lawsuit against Google over its handling of gift card scams, ruling the tech giant is not liable for millions in consumer losses. U.S. District Judge Beth Freeman found Google bears no responsibility for scam victims' losses since third-party fraudsters, not Google, induced the purchases.

The ruling came in a suit filed by Judy May, who lost $1,000 to scammers demanding Google Play gift cards for a fake government grant. The lawsuit cited Federal Trade Commission data showing Google Play gift card scams comprised 20% of reported gift card fraud between 2018-2021, totaling over $17 million in losses. Google earns 15-30% commission on gift card purchases but denies refunds, citing industry-standard policies. Freeman ruled Google had no duty to investigate reported scams or refund victims.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant's cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics" in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn't specifically mention the protests or the Israel-Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company "is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform." "We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally," Pichai continued. "When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that." The sit-in protest was staged against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During the nearly 10-hour protest, employees wore "Googler against genocide" T-shirts and occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The report notes how tech companies, "previously famed for their progressive culture where nap pods and abortion benefits were welcome," are increasingly restricting political discussions to avoid internal conflict. Pichai notes in his memo that Google has previously enjoyed "a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action."