> Gemini was rushed to market months before it was ready.
This is not an idea that should start spreading. Gemini was ready months ago, the intervening months were used to create the outcomes that people are complaining about. Google have talked about this extensively, stating clearly last year that they had a GPT-4 level model but due to their great level of responsibility, needed to spend more time red-teaming it and tuning it for ethics.
It's also important to recall that they announced Imagen (their image diffusion model) way back in 2022. At the time they refused to release it, even though DALL-E and other models were public, stating:
> At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo ... there is a risk that Imagen has encoded harmful stereotypes and representations, which guides our decision to not release Imagen for public use without further safeguards in place
Later that year Scott Alexander reported that Googlers were so horrified at the people Imagen produced that they had blocked it from representing any people at all, meaning that to test its quality vs other models you had to replace all the requests for people with robots. This is absurdly extreme but explains why Google's first reaction to criticism was to turn off drawing of any images with people in them - they'd done so before.
They spent the next two years researching how to make their model act like Gemini does now. Their image generation isn't the result of a rush to market, quite the opposite. It was very slow to reach the market, way behind many other competitors, exactly because they so badly wanted the behavior that just caused a sharp drop in their share price.
This is not an idea that should start spreading. Gemini was ready months ago, the intervening months were used to create the outcomes that people are complaining about. Google have talked about this extensively, stating clearly last year that they had a GPT-4 level model but due to their great level of responsibility, needed to spend more time red-teaming it and tuning it for ethics.
It's also important to recall that they announced Imagen (their image diffusion model) way back in 2022. At the time they refused to release it, even though DALL-E and other models were public, stating:
> At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo ... there is a risk that Imagen has encoded harmful stereotypes and representations, which guides our decision to not release Imagen for public use without further safeguards in place
Later that year Scott Alexander reported that Googlers were so horrified at the people Imagen produced that they had blocked it from representing any people at all, meaning that to test its quality vs other models you had to replace all the requests for people with robots. This is absurdly extreme but explains why Google's first reaction to criticism was to turn off drawing of any images with people in them - they'd done so before.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-prog...
They spent the next two years researching how to make their model act like Gemini does now. Their image generation isn't the result of a rush to market, quite the opposite. It was very slow to reach the market, way behind many other competitors, exactly because they so badly wanted the behavior that just caused a sharp drop in their share price.