Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo: Working around the clock to fix AI fakes, bias

- ADVERTISEMENT -

February 28, 2024 (Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai emailed staff on Tuesday to address the problematic responses from Google’s Gemini AI engine, describing them as “completely unacceptable.”

Teams are now working around the clock to rectify the issues, Pichai wrote in his note, reviewed by Bloomberg News. Stressing the need for the company to deliver unbiased and accurate information, the chief executive officer of both Alphabet and Google said structural changes will be made to prevent similar incidents.

Gemini, formerly Bard, is Google’s flagship artificial intelligence product, but the company was criticized for its image generation that depicted historically inaccurate scenes when prompted to create images of people. The Mountain View, California-based company stopped accepting prompts for people in its image generator while it worked to address the concerns raised.

“We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations,” Pichai wrote, urging a focus on “helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”

The boom in AI interest and use has brought with it a wave of closer scrutiny, with many critics pointing to the potential for AI-created content to mislead, either deliberately or accidentally.

– – –

The full note from Pichai to Google employees, first reported by Semafor, is below.

“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.

Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.

Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.

We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”