Trump says Google CEO Sundar Pichai called to apologize
During what is now a daily White House coronavirus briefing, President Trump said today that captured Google CEO Sundar Pichai called in to apologize. Pichai’s apology was not immediately clear, but Trump then praised Google’s communications team for allegedly corroborating Trump’s comments on Google’s coronavirus testing site.
“I want to thank the folks at Google and Google Communications because, as you know, they confirmed what I said on Friday,” Trump said. “The director of Google, who is a great gentleman — we said called — and apologized. I don’t know where the press got their fake news from, but it has it somewhere. find out, this is from Google [delay printing Google Communication statement on Twitter]. They released a statement [leaves paper on the floor] and you can find out for yourselves and how it came out, and I’m sure you’ll apologize. But it would be great if we could really give the news properly. It would be so, so wonderful.
We have contacted Google and the White House for further details on this call. Update (4:20 p.m. PT): Google says it has nothing to share on this call.
What is clear, however, is that Google and Alphabet CEO Pichai today posted an update on Google’s blog that describes Google’s efforts. In it, Pichai clears up some of the confusion and describes the company’s work to get more information about the virus and COVID-19 from its users, as well as the work of the Verily Life Sciences unit of “Alphabet to build a screening site. for the Bay Area (and could for a national deployment).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZavDDXYnJQ&feature=youtu.be
On Friday, Trump said 1,700 Google engineers were working on this screening site — although it is a Verily project which, as far as we can tell, was never intended for mainstream deployment. . Google never specified how many people were working on its efforts, but it doesn’t take 1,700 engineers to create the site that Trump describes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ft0KZ1nZfc
Here’s what Trump said on Friday:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzAo6_lWKCU
“I want to thank Google. Google helps develop a website. This will be done very quickly — unlike websites of the past — to determine if a test is warranted and to facilitate testing in a convenient location nearby. By the way, we have so many places behind us. We cover this country and large parts of the world, by the way. We’re not talking about the world right now, but we cover our country very, very heavily. Can be stored practically anywhere. Google currently employs 1,700 engineers. They have made tremendous progress. “