Google’s parent company lost 700 million yen in market capitalization in one business day with bizarre image debacle for its “woke” chatbot, sparking fresh investor concerns about the company’s much-touted AI tools. Lost over a billion dollars.
Alphabet stock fell 4.4% on the first day of trading on Monday, closing at $138.75. Shares of Google’s parent company rose slightly in premarket trading Tuesday.
This huge hit came after Google was forced to suspend its Gemini chatbot’s image creation tool. The tool produced a slew of factually and historically inaccurate images, including images of black Vikings, female NHL players, “diverse” versions of America’s founding fathers, and even dressed Asian women. Uniforms of German soldiers during the Nazi era.
Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes said in a note to investors that the chatbot’s strange behavior could fuel public concerns that Google is an “unreliable source of AI.” I warned you that there is.
“We have been making the case that search behavior is changing with new features that incorporate AI,” Reitzes said in the memo. According to Bloomberg. “This ‘once-in-a-generation’ change presents an opportunity for competitors in and of itself, but it becomes an even bigger opportunity if a significant portion of users become concerned about Google’s illusions and bias.”
The stock price drop also comes on the same day that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, one of the company’s heads of AI, confirmed that Gemini’s imaging tool would be offline for “several weeks” until the issue is resolved. Happened.
“We have taken this feature offline while we fix it. We look forward to bringing it back online in the coming weeks,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said on Monday.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Hassabis added that the tool “is not working as we intended.”
Critics say Google Gemini’s strange behavior is evidence of politically biased “training” from the company’s AI experts.
These complaints spiked last week following the resurfacing of allegedly politically charged tweets by Google Gemini product lead Jack Kraczyk. In an old post that went viral on X, Krawczyk said that “white privilege is very real” and that “terrible racism” is rampant in America.
The company hasn’t released details about the parameters that control the chatbot’s behavior, so it’s difficult to get a clear explanation for why it produced the so-called “awake” images.
Further testing of Google Gemini’s answers showed that the chatbot refused to condemn pedophilia, insisting there was “no right or wrong answer” when asked whether Adolf Hitler or Elon Musk was worse. and called for further caution.
