“Move fast and break things,” Zuckerberg’s early Facebook motto perfectly encapsulates the need to dispense with convention to pursue innovation in a quickly evolving industry. After a slow start, Google appears to have unofficially adopted the same sentiment as it rushes into the AI space. However, recent mishaps suggest that Google’s Gemini is placing too much emphasis on the “break things” part of the equation, alienating users in the process.
It’s been a particularly bad few weeks for Google’s AI team. First, the company hit pause on Gemini’s image generation capabilities after it produced insensitive and historically inaccurate pictures. Whether a byproduct of intentional algorithm adjustments or simply a reflection of the early state of Google’s model, the incident was a public embarrassment. It hit Alphabet’s stock price (at least temporarily) again and even cornered co-founder Sergey Brin into a rare admission that the company “messed up.”