Subject: Trust, the lack thereof
Starting in ~2020 I established a 3-4% position in Google. I eliminated the position this week. Here's why: as a business, Google is an advertising company but from a consumer-facing view, they are a utility. For a utility business to function the product has to be utile and it has to have the trust of its users. I suspect this trust is eroding - and along with it, slowly, the business.

As they say, you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you. In recent years it has been fashionable for those on the political right to claim a left-wing bias coming from tech companies. With its recent Gemini train wreck, Google has now shown that this claim has at least some merit - and very specifically, merit with respect to Google.

From a technical perspective, I can see how a well-intentioned desire to make AI-generated images look like the company's user base could produce amusingly incongruous results such as an Indian-female pope (albeit only if all other values are subordinate to that one). However, in my opinion, the results from the AI text search cannot be an accident and speak to a company culture that is indeed willing to place favored political outcomes over the accuracy and utility of the consumer-facing product. I not aware of any evidence that political bias has been found in the main search product - but would you really be surprised?

Data point: my seventy-something, non-tech-savy, conservative-but-not-crazy mother is now using DuckDuckGo. The plural of anecdote is data and I'm sure Google - and many an investor - is busy calculating how many users are being lost. As the company points out in its anti-trust filings, the competition is only a click away.

In light of this, do I continue to think Google will be an outstanding business? Better than just buying a tech index like QQQE? I do not. It's a shame. As Warren Buffett has said, “If you lose money for the firm, I will be forgiving. If you lose reputation, I will be ruthless.” This week I fired Sundar Pichai.

Levendis