Google parent loses $70 billion in market value after the Gemini AI chatbot disaster. According to a global market report, the shares of Alphabet sank 4.4% to close at $138.75 on the week’s first day of trading on Monday.
The massive revenue loss came after Google paused its Gemini chatbot’s image creation tool, which was giving out factually and historically inaccurate images such as Black Vikings, female NHL players, “diverse” versions of America’s Founding Fathers, and even an Asian woman dressed in a Nazi-era German soldier’s uniform.
The chatbot’s bizarre behavior had fueled public concerns that Google is “an unreliable source for AI,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes warned in a note to investors.
“We have been arguing that search behavior is about to change with new Artificial Intelligence infused features,” Reitzes said in the note, according to Bloomberg. “This ‘once in a generation’ change by itself creates opportunities for competitors, but even more if a meaningful portion of users grow concerned about Google’s hallucinations and bias.”
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The Google market stock also plunged after Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, one of the company’s top AI bosses, admitted that Gemini’s image tool would be offline for a “few weeks” while the issue was fixed.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We hope to have that back online very shortly in the next few weeks,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Monday.
According to market experts, since the company does not publicly reveal details about the parameters that govern the chatbot’s behavior, it’s difficult to explain why it was generating the so-called “woke” images.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says, ‘Unacceptable, we were wrong’ on Gemini AI Problematic Responses
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has sent a strongly-worded memo to employees on the recent controversy regarding its AI chatbot Gemini’s image generation tool.
In an internal memo to employees, which first appeared in Semafor, Pichai called the Gemini’s responses around race unacceptable and vowed to make structural changes to fix the problem.
Google suspended its Gemini image creation tool last week after it generated embarrassing and offensive results, in some cases declining to depict white people.
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‘Unacceptable, we were wrong”: Under-fire Google CEO Pichai reacts to Gemini AI fall-out
Here’s Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s letter on Gemini AI Fiasco as it appeared on Semafor
“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). 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.
Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement in a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.
Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information about our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.
We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.
Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.
We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise, we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”
