“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks,” Hassabis said.
Google parent company Alphabet lost over $70 billion in market value, with stock prices falling as much as 4.4 percent on Monday following the pause on Google Gemini’s AI image creator and posts surfaced of Gemini’s responses in the chat feature.
According to Bloomberg, Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes warned in a research note that problems that have arisen with Gemini may fuel the perception that Google is "an unreliable source for AI," as many companies try to launch their own AI platforms.
"We have been arguing that Search behavior is about to change - with new AI-infused features," said Reitzes. "This ‘once in a generation’ change by itself creates opportunities for competitors, but even more if a meaningful portion of users grow concerned about Google’s hallucinations and bias."
The plunge came as Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said on Monday that Gemini’s image generating feature would be offline for a "few weeks" to address issues raised, according to the New York Post.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks,” Hassabis said.
Images generated by the feature included a female pope, a black George Washington, and other racially diverse recreations of historic figures.
During his appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Hassabis said that the feature was "not working in the way we intended."
Gemini’s chat feature has also refused to say that pedophilia is wrong but had no trouble condemning the use of the n-word. It also could not define what a woman is.
Gemini has also refused to give a straightforward answer when asked whether popular conservative figures were better or worse than dictators of the past such as Hitler and Stalin.
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