Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday expressed satisfaction with the development of the company's Gemini AI, despite recent controversies.
What Happened: During the company's first-quarter earnings call, Pichai highlighted the significant advancements made in the development of the Gemini AI and other models.
He specifically mentioned the release of Gemini 1.5 Pro in February, which demonstrated substantial performance improvements across various dimensions.
He pointed out the model's long-context understanding breakthrough, which achieved the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model to date.
"We are already seeing developers and enterprise customers enthusiastically embrace Gemini 1.5 and use it for a wide range of things. Beyond Gemini, we have built other useful models, including our Gemma open models as well as Imagine visual models, and others," Pichai said.
The Google CEO then also expressed satisfaction with the progress of Gemini, saying, "We are also pleased with the progress we are seeing with Gemini and Gemini Advanced through the Gemini app on Android and the Google app on iOS."
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Why It Matters: The Gemini AI has been the subject of both praise and controversy. Despite its innovative features, the AI has faced criticism for generating historically inaccurate images and text. This led to Google temporarily disabling the AI's ability to generate images.
In February, Pichai reportedly addressed the issue in an internal memo and called it "completely [unacceptable]." Gemini AI was producing racially varied depictions of Nazi-era German soldiers, misrepresenting the U.S. Founding Fathers and Google's own co-founders.
The image generation capability in Gemini which was launched in February earlier this year aimed to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot. However, in their own word, Google admitted that Gemini had been "missing the mark."
Price Action: At the time of writing, Alphabet's Class A shares soared 11.6% in the after-hours session at $174.24, while the company's Class C shares shot up 11.4% at $176. The Class A and Class C shares closed nearly 2% lower at $156 and $157.95 respectively in the regular session, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Photo courtesy: World Economic Forum on Flickr
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.