- Reaction score
- 1,697
It’s not like artificial intelligence caught Sundar Pichai off guard. I remember sitting in the audience in January 2018 when the Google CEO said it was as profound as electricity and fire. His proclamation stunned the San Francisco audience that day, so bullish it still seems a bit absurd, and it underscores how bizarre it is that his AI strategy now appears unmoored.
The latest AI crisis at Google — where its Gemini image and text generation tool produced insane responses, including portraying Nazis as people of color — is now spiraling into the worst moment of Pichai’s tenure. Morale at Google is plummeting, with one employee telling me it’s the worst he’s ever seen. And more people are calling for Pichai’s ouster than ever before. Even the relatively restrained Ben Thompson of Stratechery demanded his removal on Monday.
Yet so much — too much — coverage of Google’s Gemini incident views it through the culture war lens. For many, Google either caved to wokeness or cowed to those who’d prefer not to address AI bias. These interpretations are wanting, and frankly incomplete explanations for why the crisis escalated to this point. The culture war narrative gives too much credit to Google for being a well organized, politics-driven machine. And the magnitude of the issue runs even deeper than Gemini’s skewed responses.
There’s now little doubt that Google steered its users’ Gemini prompts by adding words that pushed the outputs toward diverse responses — forgetting when not to ask for diversity, like with the Nazis — but the way those added words got there is the real story. Even employees on Google’s Trust and Safety team are puzzled by where exactly the words came from, a product of Google scrambling to set up a Gemini unit without clear ownership of critical capabilities. And a reflection of the lack of accountability within some parts of Google.
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The latest AI crisis at Google — where its Gemini image and text generation tool produced insane responses, including portraying Nazis as people of color — is now spiraling into the worst moment of Pichai’s tenure. Morale at Google is plummeting, with one employee telling me it’s the worst he’s ever seen. And more people are calling for Pichai’s ouster than ever before. Even the relatively restrained Ben Thompson of Stratechery demanded his removal on Monday.
Yet so much — too much — coverage of Google’s Gemini incident views it through the culture war lens. For many, Google either caved to wokeness or cowed to those who’d prefer not to address AI bias. These interpretations are wanting, and frankly incomplete explanations for why the crisis escalated to this point. The culture war narrative gives too much credit to Google for being a well organized, politics-driven machine. And the magnitude of the issue runs even deeper than Gemini’s skewed responses.
There’s now little doubt that Google steered its users’ Gemini prompts by adding words that pushed the outputs toward diverse responses — forgetting when not to ask for diversity, like with the Nazis — but the way those added words got there is the real story. Even employees on Google’s Trust and Safety team are puzzled by where exactly the words came from, a product of Google scrambling to set up a Gemini unit without clear ownership of critical capabilities. And a reflection of the lack of accountability within some parts of Google.
Inside the Crisis at Google
Culture war narratives give Google's organizational coherence a bit too much credit. There's more to the story. The post Inside the Crisis at Google appeared first on TheWrap.
