Google’s AI Efforts Marred by Turf Disputes

Google scored a rare hit with an artificial intelligence–powered product last fall:  NotebookLM, which helps people summarize documents, even generating podcasts from its results. The podcast feature drew a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal. After the product’s release, CEO Sundar Pichai praised the “small, dedicated team that built NotebookLM, an incredibly popular product that has so much promise.”

But the path to launch wasn’t quite so smooth as he made it sound. Before NotebookLM launched, staffers working on it in the company’s Google Labs experimental unit clashed with their counterparts at Workspace, which runs Google’s group of productivity apps such as Gmail and Docs, according to four people with knowledge of the situation. Workspace employees argued that the product would conflict with their plans for existing apps like Google Docs, the people said, and Workspace employees even tried to shut NotebookLM down, according to one of the people.