Google’s parent company lost more than $70 billion in market value in a single trading day after its “Gemini AI Woke” chatbot’s strange image fiasco aised concerns among investors about its heavily advertised AI tool.
On Monday, the first day of trading for the week, Alphabet’s shares dropped by 4.4%, closing at $138.75, NY Post reported. However, Google’s parent company saw a slight increase in its stock during premarket trading on Tuesday.
Concerns rise over Google’s AI reliability amid Gemini AI Woke chatbot’s image debacle
The hit occurred when Google had to halt its Gemini chatbot’s image creation tool. This tool was generating images that were factually and historically inaccurate, such as depicting 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.
Analyst Ben Reitzes from Melius Research cautioned investors in a note that the chatbot’s strange actions could increase public worries about Google being seen as an “unreliable source for AI.”
“We have been arguing that Search behavior is about to change – with new AI-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.”
Google DeepMind CEO addresses Gemini image tool shutdown
The stock drop coincided with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, a key figure in the company’s AI leadership, acknowledging that Gemini’s image tool would be offline for “a few weeks” to address the problem.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Monday. During his appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Hassabis mentioned that the tool was not “working the way we intended.”
Critics have suggested that Google Gemini’s strange behavior indicates it might have received politically biased “training” from the company’s AI experts. These concerns intensified last week when politically charged tweets attributed to Google Gemini’s product lead Jack Krawczyk resurfaced. In these old posts, which gained attention on social media, Krawczyk reportedly commented on issues like “white privilege” and “egregious racism” in America.
