Google sued for scraping data in AI expansion bid; company veteran quits

In a proposed class action lawsuit, Alphabet’s Google was accused of allegedly misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems, a report by Reuters said.
 

According to the report, the complaint was filed in San Francisco federal court by eight individuals seeking to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders said Google’s unauthorised scraping of data from websites violated their privacy and property rights.
 

Google employee since ‘99 quits
 

One of Google’s earliest employees will step back from an executive management role, having held a senior position at the company’s cloud unit. Urs Hölzle joined the firm in 1999 as its eighth employee, and will now transition into a role as a Google Fellow, the company said.
 

In Google’s early years, Hölzle was instrumental in building the unique computing machinery that supported its major services, letting the company expand quickly from search into mapping, video and countless other fields. Eventually, Google would package that computing infrastructure as the core selling point of its cloud division. More recently, Hölzle led Google’s push into making its own chips for processing AI, although the firm has been struggling to sell that hardware via cloud services. Hölzle is one of the last remaining Google employees that worked closely with company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
 

CNBC earlier reported that Hölzle would become an “individual contributor” after more than two decades of leading technical teams, citing an internal email from Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian. The veteran will focus on articulating technical AI processes, facilitating discussions, and streamlining decision making.