Opinion: Google Gemini AI fiasco reveals a company that is stuck (2024)

New Delhi,UPDATED: Feb 27, 2024 16:52 IST

Last week, Google was the butt of a joke on the interwebs, a place that the company once used to rule. In some way, it still rules our virtual spaces. But last week, after it was forced to turn off certain image creating capabilities of Gemini AI, it became clear that Google is not alright.

Sure, it is a healthy company with a tremendous ad business that generates billions of dollars in revenue and net income. Yet, it is also falling behind some of the more nimble competitors, and as they push Google to react — make it dance as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once quipped — the company is coming across as a lumbering tech giant that can’t seem to get anything right.

The Gemini AI, however, is hardly a problem. Although it belies the belief that a company like Google failed to stress test its AI tool well enough before releasing it. Because if it had done so, it would not have been creating black popes and dark-skinned Nazi soldiers. These are the kind of topics that any decent tester would have caught in 15 minutes. In fact, Gemini AI acted in such a bone-headed manner while creating images that when people on X aka Twitter said that it would absolutely not create images of “white people”, the accusation stuck.

With the drums — or rather the noises produced by keyboard warriors — of the “culture war” beating all the time nowadays, the emphasis Gemini AI put on creating diverse images made it a beeping and blinking target for the “anti-woke” mob. And we know that in 2024, this mob, often egged on by the likes of Elon Musk, is particularly vicious. First the target was Gemini AI, then Google and within days the Google employees — including CEO Sundar Pichai — were in crosshairs.

Google is a “woke” company, went the chant. And Musk tweeted, “I’m glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilisational programming clear to all.”

Of course, this chant is typical hyperventilation that the “anti-woke” crowd indulges in whenever it perceives a threat to “western civilisation”. But the big message from the Gemini AI fiasco is that Google is indeed stuck in a rut. This is a company that has seemingly lost the ability to dream and create the kind of tech products and services that once let it take over the world. It still has the lucrative — and extremely profitable — Google Search, bringing it rich rewards. But beyond the Search, Google stands in a wasteland littered with products it has killed and scrapped in the last 15 years.

Just days after the Gemini AI fiasco, here is a series of tweets that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian sent out:

A few days later, came the news that Google is shutting down Google Pay in the US and instead would be moving customers to Google Wallet. That prompted someone to reply to Kurian with this hilarious — but also kind of sad — response:

Here is a thing: as funny as Sacha’s response is, it is also accurate. Google, in the last 15 odd years, has become a company that talks big, shows cool demos and then either launches something mundane or half-baked, or simply doesn’t launch anything. And once it has launched a half dozen of similar products — messaging apps, for example — it goes on a rampage, killing a few of them and rebranding or merging others.

We have seen this again and again. Messaging apps. Video calling apps. Payment apps. Photo apps. Even the TV OS of which Google now has two: Google TV and Android TV. Chromebooks and ChromeOS are stuck. It seems there are multiple teams within the company working on similar products all the time. Or else, there are teams working on cool stuff that is probably never ready for launch and for consumers. For example, Google blew everyone’s mind at Google IO in 2018 when its Duplex bot, with its “ummm” and “hmmm” sounded so real that it sparked 1000 articles in the media. That bot never materialised into a proper service.

It is the same with Google’s many other products. Google Glass, after all the hype, quietly withered away. Google killed its fairly successful Nexus phone collabs and then brought out Pixel phones. Pixel is only moderately successful, largely because Google still can’t figure — or doesn’t want to figure out — how to put current and competitive chipset and hardware in its phones. Waymo cars, which are Google’s driverless cars, after years of training, are finally available as taxis in a few US cities, but the rollout is slow and juddering. In 2019, Google rebranded Home products to Nest, but beyond the rebranding, nothing much has happened in the space.

In between, Google has acquired multiple companies — most notably Motorola, which it resold to Lenovo — and Fitbit. With the products of these two companies, at least in a visible way, Google hasn’t done much so far.

The only major service that continues to be a juggernaut for the company is Google Search. But now in 2024, even in Google Search, there are cracks visible. In the last 15 years, Google has contributed to turning the internet into a place that is full of low quality content and spam. Once, this low quality content — by virtue of its quantity — helped more and more ad revenue flow to Google. Now, the world is getting tired of what the web has turned into, and increasingly, as AI assistants like ChatGPT take over the job of cataloguing and fetching information to users, the utility of a search engine is set to diminish. Just a week ago, Gartner predicted that search volume is going to come down by 25 per cent in the next two years due to AI assistants.

The mystery part of Google’s recent history is that it is staffed by some of the brightest minds in the world. And they work on some of the coolest tech stuff. Deepmind, for example, is arguably the best team doing AI research in any tech company. And yet, the result of Google’s AI effort is something like Gemini AI, which became a joke within weeks after its launch.

This is not to deny Google its due. Google is still, arguably, the most important tech company in the world. Of all the tech giants, it is one company that powers the world and its people in such a fundamental way that we cannot imagine life without it. Not Apple or Microsoft, not Facebook, not Amazon, and definitely not Netflix. They could vanish tomorrow and the world will shrug it off. Google vanishes tomorrow and we will have a crisis.

It is Google that seems essential to our lives. Just two products — Gmail and Google Maps — are worth more in terms of value they provide to users than anything that Facebook has offered in its entire history. And it is precisely for this reason, precisely due to Google’s outsize and largely net positive impact on the world that it is worth rooting for the company. I am certain that billions of Google’s users do root for it. But at the same time, it is also quite clear that Google badly needs its old mojo back. It needs something, a product — or a bunch of products — that only it can create and offer, to remind everyone that 25 years after it came into existence, it still retains enough spark to reshape and remake the world for the better.

(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. He has been writing about personal technology and gadgets since 2005)

(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)