Google parent Alphabet will reportedly lay off dozens of workers in a secretive division that develops recent technology as part of the search giant’s broader cost-cutting push.
In recent months, the division, called X Lab, has been in talks with enterprise capitalists, sovereign wealth funds and personal equity firms on funding, people aware of the matter told Bloomberg.
Getting outside funding would allow X Lab projects to be spun out more easily, functioning as independent startups with support from Alphabet and other investors, one of the people told Bloomberg, which also viewed an organization email on the subject.
The innovation lab has worked on high-tech projects like Wing, which consists of delivery drones; Loom, an online network of balloons; and Makani, kites that generate wind energy.
“X tackles global challenges like climate change and connectivity and we continually look for tactics to streamline how we bring our moonshots to life,” a spokeswoman for the division told Reuters.
The move comes days after Google said it could lay off a whole lot of employees in its promoting sales team and its hardware, Voice Assistant and augmented reality teams amid its aggressive campaign to cut costs and improve efficiency.
Few of X’s projects have was durable businesses, Bloomberg reported. Perhaps probably the most widely known of its endeavors is Waymo, a fleet of autonomous vehicles standing for “Way Forward in Mobility.”
“We’re expanding our approach to deal with spinning out more projects as independent firms funded through market-based capital,” Astro Teller, who leads X, wrote in the e-mail.
“We’ll do that by opening our scope to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to emphasize lean teams and capital efficiency,” Teller added, per Bloomberg.
As part of its restructuring, X is laying off dozens of employees, Bloomberg reported, though it wasn’t immediately clear what number of positions might be affected by the headcount reduction.
The layoffs are focused on support staff, one person with knowledge of the cuts told Bloomberg.
Representatives for X Lab didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
X Lab, which has been described as a “semi-secret research and development facility,” was launched in 2010 by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Lately, the lab — which relies out of Google’s corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, Calif. — has come to be often called X, with increased pressure to turn its speculative projects into profitable businesses as Alphabet looks to cut costs across the board.
To date this month, Google has already confirmed layoffs across multiple parts of its empire –including several hundred job cuts on its ad sales team and greater than 1,000 combined workers in other units, including its core engineering team and the hardware division chargeable for devices equivalent to the Pixel, Nest and Fitbit.
The job cuts marked a rough start to the yr for Google’s workforce, whose headcount was reduced by greater than 12,000 throughout 2023.
Unsurprisingly, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has identified “durable cost savings” among the many tech giant’s key goals in 2024.
Pichai hinted at further belt-tightening plans as part of a listing titled “2024 company-wide OKRs,” or objective key results, that Google shared with its employees on Thursday last week.
“Improve company velocity, efficiency, and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings,” said one of the seven stated goals, according to a replica obtained by the Verge.
The highest goal on Google’s list was to “deliver the world’s most advanced, secure, and responsible AI.” The memo also mentioned boosting innovation through Google Cloud services and constructing “probably the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices.”
The note expands upon a companywide memo Pichai sent out the evening prior, which boasted the headline “2024 priorities and the yr ahead,” suggesting that more job cuts are pending.
“We have now ambitious goals and might be investing in our big priorities this yr,” likely referring to the bogus intelligence race, according to CNBC.
The note comes a month after Google introduced Gemini, its most advanced AI model yet that’s reportedly “capable of more specific reasoning.”
“The fact is that to create the capability for this investment, we’ve to make tough selections,” Pichai wrote, warning that this implies some teams might be “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity,” per the memo.
Pichai said the looming “role eliminations will not be at the size of last yr’s reductions, and is not going to touch every team.” He added, nonetheless, that “to be upfront, some teams will proceed to make resource allocation decisions,” according to CNBC.