Google layoffs: Employees in these teams may face job cuts amid Gemini row

Google layoffs: The team is tasked with setting up rules on AI products with the aim to minimise bad actors.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google may lay off some employees from its trust and safety team while asking other members of the group to be on standby amid issues in its generative AI tool Gemini, Bloomberg reported. These job cuts will impact “fewer than 10 people out of a team of about 250,” it added.

Google layoffs: The Google logo is seen.(Reuters)

The team is tasked with setting up rules on AI products with the aim to minimise bad actors that could potentially manipulate the tools. The team also conducts risk evaluations to ensure the tools are safe for Google’s global user base, the report claimed.

Amid Gemini row, Google asked some employees to work in order to prevent further missteps by the tool, it added. A Google leader wrote in an email to trust and safety employees as per the report, “We need multiple volunteers on a stand-by per time block so we can activate rapid adversarial testing on high priority topics."

Another person told Bloomberg that the team has been under “an overwhelming workload as the company deals with the fallout of Gemini generating ahistorical images of people.”

Earlier, Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the teams' efforts saying that employees were “working around the clock” to remedy the problems users had flagged with Gemini’s responses

Google's job cuts have been long planned and are a part of the company's efforts to slim down. Since mid-January, the company has been reorganizing employees across teams as a Google spokesperson said, “We’re responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead. We’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”