Aravind Srinivas, chief executive of AI search-engine startup Perplexity, said Google’s flub with Gemini was avoidable in a recent interview with The Verge. “It’s not a small bug. It’s actually poor execution,” he said. “The image generation thing is actually very easy to catch in testing.”
The “image generation thing” Srinivas refers to is the recent drama around Gemini’s image-generating feature, which came under fire last month for being overly “woke.”
Users complained that it generated images of people of color in historically inaccurate contexts. Google paused the feature, and its top executives came forward to apologize. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said it was “completely unacceptable and we got it wrong” in a memo to staff. Google cofounder Sergey Brin said the company “definitely messed up on the image generation” during a talk at San Francisco’s AGI house.
But Srinivas said the problem reflects a larger cultural issue at Google.
“They should only prioritize one aspect, which is giving an accurate answer. They don’t do that for whatever reasons,” he told The Verge.
Srinivas said that Perplexity — which makes an amped-up search engine that has attracted more than $100 million in funding — is focused on accuracy and neutrality.
The company is trying to be the “nerd in your classroom who’s just always right, but you don’t hate them for having a certain political value,” he said. “Google’s trying to be something different. That’s why they got into trouble.”
Google and Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
