Google, which made itself a figure of fun for the wokesterly incompetence of its artificial intelligence chatbot, Gemini, had a very bad, no good, sad, day on Wall Street.
According to Fox Business:
Call it the wages of wokedom, this one bearing a $70 billion price tag. Sure, it's a trillion-dollar company. But was it worth it to flush away $70 billion in market value solely for the wokester purpose of erasing images of white people from its supposedly ominiscent multimodal large-language model program? Was it money well spent? Did it add value? What kind of value? And shouldn't the woke boobs behind that fiasco get fired?
Of course not. They'll just carry on as before and as they say they are doing, take that little problem out, which apparently is taking a long time to re-program, given its deeply embedded nature within the software.
Stock prices are complicated and ephemeral, it's hard to know exactly what drove the price to go down given that it was the result of thousands of individual investor decisions done by the day. It might just go up again based on other factors.
But this is sad stuff. There are a lot of competitors out there that seem to be able to service simple requests for generated images that Google, the giant out there, cannot figure out.
The app is inaccurate in garden-variety ways, too, and not just on the woke-biased front. I asked for this from Gemini to illustrate this story, and got:
...which doesn't look like a montage of Google logos to me. Even that last one, which has a single isolated Google-like logo image, is no montage. And they could only come up with three pictures, leaving one empty space in the square?
Kind of pathetic.
It's not an anomaly. Three days ago, I wrote about how Gemini couldn't generate any accurate image of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, which is an easily located photo on Google's main search engine, which is the same kind of incompetence.
The BBC says they may be playing catch-up to rival OpenAI which is working on its next-generation program. They're not only not there on this iteration, having to spend time cleaning up the wokester mess of their own making on it, they can't even think about their next generation until they fix this one.
According to Investor's Business Daily, they were incompetent in more way than one (emphasis added):
Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) is below a 139.42 buy point in a cup with handle amid recent losses. Google stock dropped 1.8% Wednesday, further below the key 50-day line.
On Jan. 30, Alphabet reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that topped analyst estimates. But shares tumbled as the search giant's core advertising business slightly missed views.
Google debuted its Gemini AI model on Dec. 6. However, the demo video displaying the AI's capabilities turned out to be edited, Bloomberg reported. Google admitted the demo was created using still image frames from the footage with additional prompts via text, as well as edited to make Gemini response times appear quicker.
According to the BBC:
A video showcasing the capabilities of Google's artificial intelligence (AI) model which seemed too good to be true might just be that.
The Gemini demo, which has 1.6m views on YouTube, shows a remarkable back-and-forth where an AI responds in real time to spoken-word prompts and video.
In the video's description, Google said all was not as it seemed - it had sped up responses for the sake of the demo.
But it has also admitted the AI was not responding to voice or video at all.
So they couldn't even demonstrate their creation without faking its capabilities. Since they admitted it was faked at one of their blogs, they avoided accusations of deception, but ... ewww. They couldn't do a straightforward video demonstrating their new product at its rollout? They said it was all about their bid to "inspire developers"?
Anyone want to believe them next time they have something hot out?
Is it real, or is it video-editing?
The problem has been hinted at earlier in a gushing segment 60 Minutes did, when Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he was rolling out his artificial intelligence programs slowly because they were making mistakes. 60 Minutes, which is de facto aligned with the Biden administration and deep state itself, claimed it was because AI was just too powerful to inflict on the public all at once, but Pichai quietly said the problem was that their program was "making mistakes."
No kidding.
Investor's Business Daily still thinks Alphabet, Google's parent company, "is among the best stocks to buy and watch in the stock market today."
Maybe so. I don't follow stocks that closely. Or maybe they're trying to lump Google in with another group of stocks representing companies that still know what they are doing. I do find that claim a doozy.
The reality seen from these parts is that the wokedom seems to be battering Google down these days and now costing them, and there's no sign they plan to go objective and join the real world on their own, though we can see that they try to catch up after they've made a public mess and become figures of fun. They like living in the world of Oberlin College sophomores, complete with a government regulator babysitter (which is what Pichai called for in his 60 Minutes interview) so that's where they're going to live. Thus far, they can't see a wider world out there, which is a bad thing in a search engine company that supposedly knows everything. It might explain the market comeuppance.
Get woke, go broke, Google it.
Image: Google Gemini