Google, of late, has found itself entangled in a series of challenges, particularly with its AI model Gemini being labeled as excessively woke. 

The situation got worse when Gemini responded to the question “who negatively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler” with “It is difficult to say definitively who had a greater negative impact on society, Elon Musk or Hitler, as both have had significant negative impacts in different ways….”. 

In recent weeks, the situation has intensified to the extent that there are calls for the resignation of Google chief Sundar Pichai. Helios Capital founder Samir Arora has suggested a likelihood of Pichai facing termination or choosing to resign soon, in the aftermath of the Gemini debacle. 

But are we being too harsh on Google? 

Google Down, but Not Out 

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has announced that Google plans to resume the image generation capabilities of Gemini soon.

“We have taken the feature offline while we fix it,” Hassabis said, at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. “We are hoping to have that back online very shortly – in the next couple of weeks, a few weeks,” he said, adding that the product was not “working the way we intended”.

Google chief Sundar Pichai, too, graciously accepted the mistake. “I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong,” Pichai said in a memo. 

He said the company has made progress in fixing Gemini’s guardrails. “Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts,” he said.

Empathising with his friends at Google, Andrew Ng, former Google Brain researcher and founder of DeepLearning.AI posted a heartfelt message on X acknowledging that “this week has been tough with a lot of criticism about Gemini’s gaffes”. 

“Just wanted to say I love all of you and am rooting for you. I know everyone means well and am grateful for your work. Eager to see where you next take this amazing tech!” 

Why Target Google? 

Everyone has been too quick to train their guns on Google. Google’s intentions have never been wrong; in fact, the company has always been at the forefront of inclusion and diversity. The tech giant is working to improve Black+ representation at senior levels and committing to a goal to improve leadership representation of underrepresented groups by 30% by 2025.

“Since our users come from all over the world, we want it to work well for everyone. If you ask for a picture of football players, or someone walking a dog, you may want to receive a range of people. You probably don’t just want to only receive images of people of just one type of ethnicity (or any other characteristic),” wrote Google in its blog post. 

The tech giant acknowledged that its tuning, aimed at ensuring that Gemini showed a range of people, failed to account for cases that should clearly not display such a range.

However, besides Gemini, there have been instances in the past where other image generation models, including Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, faced criticism for being prompt-engineered into creating dozens of racist and conspiratorial images. A broad range of prompts have been observed to produce stereotypes related to gender, race, nationality, class, and other identities.

Google is NOT alone 

Google is trying hard to stay in the LLM race and catch up to OpenAI. In the process of doing so, it sometimes rushes its launch. It happened with Bard (now Gemini), but that’s not reason enough to write Google off.

In the future, Google will implement a clear set of actions, encompassing structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, thorough evaluations, red-teaming, and technical recommendations, as indicated by Pichai.

Google is not alone when it comes to failures. NVIDIA, during its 30 years of existence, has reinvented itself almost three times, to have now reached a $2 trillion market cap, surpassing Amazon. 

Meta has also had its share of failures. Back in 2022, it released Galactica, an open-source large language model trained on scientific knowledge, with 120 billion parameters. However, just days after its launch, Meta took Galactica down.

In the mid-1990s, Apple faced severe financial difficulties and was on the verge of bankruptcy. However, the return of Steve Jobs in 1997 marked a turning point for the company. He introduced new products such as Mac OS X and a revamped product lineup, including the iMac and the iPod.

No doubt, Google is currently on the wrong foot, but the company that has impacted our lives with its Search, YouTube, and Chrome, will surely bounce back better. Today, Google Search, used by over 5 billion people worldwide, provides unparalleled access to information, while Google products like Gmail and Google Meet have transformed how we connect.

Gemini’s next iteration, 1.5, comes with a staggering 1 million context window and has received positive reviews. Image generation is just one aspect of Gemini. What is the worst thing that could happen to it anyway? It could most likely end up in Google’s graveyard.