Google faces backlash for school AI plan

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1:46Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and, of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Google faces backlash for their plan that would turn off search for schools that restrict AI. I'm Imran Shaikh, and I'm not restricting your daily crunch for Thursday starting right now. Design software maker Canva is cutting 22 % of its staff, amounting to 1 ,271 people amid a growth slowdown. Now, the company's co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins, in a know-to employee, said while Canva has scaled so far, it needs to change to address slowing growth.

2:26Over the past 13 years, we've turned a dream in a pitch deck into a platform used by hundreds of millions of people. None of it would have been possible without the talent, imagination, and care of every single person who has been part of this journey. Yet success in our first chapter doesn't guarantee success in the next. This has been our hardest year yet, and as we shared earlier this year, our growth has slowed for the first time in a decade. Perkins wrote, Canva is reshuffling its organizational chart and merging its product growth and platform teams to reduce communication friction. The company is also reducing subspecialization, which means its employees might be asked to take up more responsibilities.

3:05The company is also moving toward hybrid work and asking people to work from an office a few days a week. The company has been shipping its own AI models to reduce costs and reliance on third-party models, but it still had to cut its revenue growth forecast to 20 % from 30 % to address ballooning AI costs. This also resulted in Canva's early investors cutting its valuation to about$35 billion earlier this year. Canva is also facing increasing competition from AI startups and general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, whose image generation capabilities allow people to easily put together posters and presentations.

3:44Waymo is going to officially split with Uber in the Austin and Atlanta markets starting in January 2028, co-CEO Takidra Mawakana told Bloomberg News in a report published Wednesday. Now, the robo-taxi company will instead offer rides directly through its own smartphone app, like it does in other cities. Mawakana's comments confirm reporting earlier this year by the Financial Times that Waymo was looking to get out of its deal with Uber, which was set to expire in May 2028. Mawakana told Bloomberg that Waymo initially partnered with Uber because the ride-hail giant offered scale, but the experience for riders has been a little bit of a crapshoot, she said.

4:20especially because riders never know for sure if they're going to hail a robo-taxi or a human-driven car. It's important for us to have that relationship with the rider. We've gotten that feedback from the riders in those markets, Mawakana said. Now, Uber, which has a ton of robo-taxi and other autonomous vehicle partners, told Bloomberg that it was Waymo's idea not to add an option in the RideHailGiants app to book a robo-taxi directly. Google was met with swift backlash on Tuesday after it announced that schools using Google's K-12 software will not be able to use Search unless they opt into using AI tools.

4:55Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google, told the New York Times that Search and AI are deeply integrated. So if a student's school doesn't opt into using AI tools like Gemini, then students will not have access to Search and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available. Now, even as Google made this announcement on a busy election day, several left-leaning politicians took time to speak up about their concerns. Senator Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont, accused Google in an X post of extortion, writing that Google is threatening schools. If you stop your students from using AI, we will cut off your access to Google search.

5:32Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat from Connecticut, said on X that Google is more concerned with forcing Gemini into schools than enabling students to succeed. Lina Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chair and staunch advocate against monopolies, also condemned Google's decision as anti-competitive. This highlights the danger of allowing an unregulated monopolist to control an essential service, she wrote, continuing, multiple courts have found Google liable for violating antitrust laws, and this latest move shows it remains unchastened. New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani accused Google of being a monopoly, commenting, no corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children.

6:13While search is a necessary tool for information gathering, educators worry that its built-in AI overviews could dissuade students from finding answers themselves. For millions of students required to use Chromebooks and Google education tools, using a different search engine isn't a simple fix. Google says that it's working on a guided learning tool for student accounts in search, which is supposed to walk students through the process of solving a problem or finding information rather than just handing them the answer. If a student's struggling with a math problem, for example, the feature may prompt them to refresh their memory about the rules for dividing exponents instead of, you know, spitting out a number.

6:51In response to the backlash, Google pointed out in a post on X that it had listened to educators by turning off access to AI products by default and noted that schools could turn on Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and search individually. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Ivan Mehta, Amanda Silberling, Sean O 'Kane, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here tomorrow. Same tech time, same Crunch channel. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.