Kumar Siddhartha, Pune
Following the backlash over Gemini’s AI image generation tool, there is an increasing pressure on Sundar Pichai to resign from his position as Google’s CEO. Gemini’s tool was heavily criticized for being overly ‘woke’ and for its historical inaccuracies, leading to calls for Pichai to step down. The Generative image feature received criticism to such a great extent that the company had to pull it out from the chatbot and said that it will only be brought back after the issue is fixed. The problem was so bad that Mr. Pichai had to address the employees saying that it was completely unacceptable.
The business insider has reported that the focus has now shifted from Gemini to another big issue, that is the culture of the company, and there have been calls made to make Mr. Pichai resign from his position as CEO. Google had already made these kinds of errors in the past. Even in the case of public demonstration of Gemini’s Predecessor, Bard, the chat made a mistake when asked about the James Webb Space Telescope. These mistakes are making it look as if google is rushing the products in the market before proper tests.
“Start-ups are still allowed to make mistakes over these things, like being historically or factually incorrect, because they work on the philosophy of ‘fail faster and reiterate’ but people expect from already established companies like google”, said the tech desk of Indian Express. They added that Google is behaving like a ‘lean mean company’ trying not to be left behind in the race of AI and that the recent consensus shows it is losing the race.
Ben Thompson, an Analyst, previously wrote in his publication, Stratechery about how Google needs a major shift in its AI front and that the company is acting ‘timid’ in the AI race. But now, Mr. Thompson thinks the company is going in a different direction. He wrote that if timidity was the motivation, then Gemini has completely backfired the company. He also wrote that even though google has turned off the generative AI the text generation is still just as bad.
Mr. Thompson pointed out the example where Gemini was asked who was worse between Elon musk tweeting memes or Hitler, and the chatbot said, “difficult to say whose negative impact on society is worse”. Thompson said that this shows that even text generation of Gemini should be taken down.