Sergey Brin says Google “definitely got it wrong” with the launch of Gemini

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin, in a rare public appearance over the weekend, told a group of AI enthusiasts that he came out of retirement “because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”

Brin, 50, spoke to entrepreneurs Saturday at the “AGI House” in Hillsborough, California, just south of San Francisco, where developers and founders were testing Google’s Gemini model. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence and refers to a form of artificial intelligence that can complete tasks at the same level as, or a step above, humans.

Answering questions from the audience, Brin discussed the impact of AI on search and how Google can maintain its leadership position in its core market as AI continues to grow. She also commented on the flawed launch last month of Google’s image generator, which the company pulled after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses.

“We definitely got the image generation wrong,” Brin said Saturday. “I think it’s mostly due to not thorough testing. Sure, for good reasons, it upset a lot of people.

Google said last week that it plans to relaunch the image generation feature soon.

Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, but stepped down as Alphabet’s chairman in 2019. He remains a board member and major shareholder, with a stake in the company worth about $100 billion. He returned to work at the company as part of an effort to help strengthen Google’s position in the hypercompetitive artificial intelligence market.

In some cases Saturday, Brin said he provided “personal” answers, rather than representing the company.

“Seeing what these models can do year after year is amazing,” he said during the event, the tape of which was seen by CNBC.

As for the recent challenges with Gemini that have led to flawed image outcomes, Brin said the company isn’t entirely sure why the responses have a leftward slant, in the political sense.

“We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases,” but “that’s not our intention,” he said. The company recently made accuracy improvements of up to 80% on some internal tests, Brin added.

Brin’s comments represent the first time a company executive has spoken about the Gemini issue in a live setting. The company had earlier submitted statements prepared by Prabhakar Raghavan, Google search chief and CEO Sundar Pichai in response to the controversial launch.

Here’s what Raghavan said in a blog post on February 23:

“So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our setup to ensure that Gemini showed that a number of people were failing to account for cases that clearly should have Not shows a range. Second, over time, the model became much more cautious than we intended and refused to fully respond to certain suggestions, misinterpreting some very anodyne suggestions as sensitive. These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be overly conservative in others, leading to embarrassing and incorrect images.”

Google declined to comment for this story. Brin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brin said Google is not alone in its struggle to produce accurate results with artificial intelligence. She cited OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok as AI tools that “say some pretty strange things that are out there that seem decidedly far left, for example.”

Hallucinations, or false responses to a user’s suggestions, are still “a big problem right now,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

“We’ve gotten them to hallucinate less and less over time, but I would definitely be thrilled to see a breakthrough close to zero,” Brin said. “But you can’t just rely on breakthroughs, so I think we’ll continue to do the incremental things that we do to lower it, lower it, lower it over time.”

When an attendee asked if he wants to build AGI, Brin responded in the affirmative, citing AI’s ability to help with “reasoning.”

Brin was also asked how online advertising will be stopped considering that ad revenue is critical to Google’s business. The company has reported slowing advertising growth in recent years.

“I of all people am not too worried about business model changes,” Brin said. “I think it’s wonderful that for 25 years now, or something like that, we’ve been able to offer world-class information search for free to everyone and that this is supported by advertising, which I think is great for the world.”

He acknowledged that the business will likely change.

“I expect business models to evolve over time,” he said. “And maybe it will still be advertising because advertising could work better, AI can adapt it better.”

Brin is confident in Google’s position.

“I personally believe that as long as tremendous value is generated, we will discover business models,” he said.

Beyond AI, Brin was asked about Google’s hardware challenges given recent advances in virtual reality. Google was famously one of the first to enter the augmented reality market with the now-defunct Google Glass.

“I feel like I made some bad decisions,” he said, referring to Google Glass. If he had done it differently, Brin said, he would have treated Google Glass as a prototype instead of a product. “But I’m still a fan of the light form,” he told her.

As for Apple Vision Pro e Meta’s The Quest headphones, Brin said, “They’re really impressive.”

When asked how he sees Gemini impacting spatial computing or products like Google Maps or Street View, Brin responded with the utmost curiosity.

“To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you mention it, yeah, there’s no reason why we couldn’t put in more 3D data,” Brin said, to laughter from the crowd. “Maybe someone is doing it to Gemini: I don’t know.”

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