Google co-founder Sergey Brin says in rare public appearance that company ‘definitely messed up’ Gemini image launch
Sergey Brin, president of Alphabet and co-founder of Google
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a rare public appearance over the weekend, told a group of artificial intelligence enthusiasts that he came out of retirement “because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”
Brin, 50, spoke to entrepreneurs on Saturday at the “AGI House” in Hillsborough, California, just south of San Francisco, where developers and founders were testing Google’s Gemini model. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence and refers to a form of AI that can complete tasks to the same level, or a step above, humans.
In taking questions from the crowd, Brin discussed AI’s impact on search and how Google can maintain its leadership position in its core market as AI continues to grow. He also commented on the flawed launch last month of Google’s image generator, which the company pulled after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses.
“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said on Saturday. “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”
Google said last week that it plans to relaunch the image generation feature soon.
Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, but stepped down as president of Alphabet in 2019. He remains a board member and a principal shareholder, with a stake in the company worth about $100 billion. He’s returned to work at the company as part of an effort to help ramp up Google’s position in the hypercompetitive AI market.
In some cases on Saturday, Brin said he was giving “personal” answers, as opposed to representing the company.
“Seeing what these models can do year after year is astonishing,” he said at the event, a recording of which was viewed by CNBC.
Regarding the recent challenges with Gemini that led to flawed image results, Brin said the company isn’t quite sure why responses have a leftward tilt, in the political sense.
“We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases” but “that’s not our intention,” he said. The company has recently made accuracy improvements by as much as 80% on certain internal tests, Brin added.
Brin’s comments represent the first time a company executive has spoken on the Gemini matter in a live setting. The company previously sent prepared statements from Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search, and CEO Sundar Pichai in response to the controversial rollout.
Here’s what Raghavan said in a blog post on Feb. 23:
“So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive. These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.”
Google declined to comment for this story. Brin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Some pretty weird things’
Brin said Google is far from alone in its struggles to produce accurate results with AI. He cited OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok services as AI tools that, “say some pretty weird things that are out there that definitely feel far left, for example.”
Hallucinations, or false responses to a user’s prompt, are still “a big problem right now,” he said. “No question about it.”
“We have made them hallucinate less and less over time, but I’d definitely be excited to see a breakthrough that’s near-zero,” Brin said. “But you can’t just like — count on breakthroughs so I think we’re just going to keep doing the incremental things we do to bring it down, down, down over time.”
When asked by an attendee if he wants to build AGI, Brin answered in the affirmative, citing the ability for AI to help with “reasoning.”
Brin was also asked how online advertising will be disrupted considering ad revenue is core to Google’s business. The company has reported slowing ad growth in the last few years.
Sergey Brin, Google Inc. co-founder, left, Larry Page, Google Inc. co-founder, center, and Eric Schmidt, Google Inc. chairman and chief executive officer, attend a news conference inside the Sun Valley Inn at the 28th annual Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on Thursday, July 8, 2010.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“I of all people am not too terribly concerned about business model shifts,” Brin said. “I think it’s wonderful that we’ve been now for 25 years, or whatever, able to give just world class information search for free to everyone and that’s supported by advertising, which in my mind is great for the world.”
He did acknowledge that the business is likely to change.
“I expect business models are going to evolve over time,” he said. “And maybe it will still be advertising because advertising could work better, the AI is able to better tailor it.”
Brin is confident in Google’s position.
“I personally feel as long as there’s huge value being generated, we’ll figure out the business models,” he said.
Beyond AI, Brin was asked about Google’s difficulties in hardware given recent advancements in virtual reality. Google was notoriously early to the augmented reality market with the now-defunct Google Glass.
“I feel like I made some bad decisions,” he said, referring to Google Glass. If he were doing it differently, Brin said, he would have the treated Google Glass as a prototype instead of a product. “But, I’m still a fan of the lightweight” form, he said.
In regards to the Apple Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest headsets, Brin said, “They’re very impressive.”
When asked about how he sees Gemini impacting spatial computing or products like Google Maps or Street view, Brin responded with as much curiosity as anything.
“To be honest, I haven’t thought about it, but now that you say it, yeah there’s no reason we couldn’t put in more 3D data,” Brin said, to laughs from the crowd. “Maybe somebody’s doing it at Gemini — I don’t know.”
WATCH: Google vs. Google
Upgrade CEO Renaud Laplanche speaks at a conference in Brooklyn, New York, in 2018.
Alex Flynn | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Upgrade, the online lender started by LendingClub founder Renaud Laplanche, has raised a new round of funding that values the startup at $7.3 billion.
The company said in a press release on Thursday that it raised $165 million in a round led by Neuberger Berman, with participation from LuminArx Capital Management. Laplanche, who created Upgrade in 2016, said it’s the first time the company has raised money since 2021.
“We’ve been cash flow positive over the past three years, so we didn’t have to do a new round,” Laplanche said in an interview.
Upgrade got its start offering relatively small personal loans, operating in a similar market as LendingClub. The company has since expanded deeper into financial services with checking and savings accounts, a credit card, credit health monitoring and a buy now, pay later offering. In 2023, Upgrade acquired BNPL travel company Uplift for $100 million.
Revenue has more than doubled since the company’s last fundraise, Laplanche said, and annualized revenue passed $1 billion in May.
Laplanche, who took LendingClub public in 2014, said Upgrade is looking to IPO but wanted additional capital for its balance sheet in the meantime. He said the company is also establishing a new valuation as it begins to offer employee liquidity.
“We were probably 12 to 18 months away from an IPO at this stage,” he said. “So we wanted to go ahead and make sure everyone could sell a little bit of stock now without having to wait for the IPO.”
Although consumer lending is still dominated by traditional banks like JPMorgan Chase, Laplanche said the majority of Upgrade’s customers are migrating from the legacy banks to take advantage of more automated and faster services.
“This year, we’re focusing mostly on making the customer experience make sense across multiple products and making sure that the customer who might have joined Upgrade through a BNPL product has a very seamless experience,” Laplanche said.
The company has also been focusing on home improvement and auto financing, areas that surpassed $2 billion and $1 billion, respectively, in total loan originations earlier this year.
Competition is rising across the board.
Chime, which offers an array of online banking services, went public in June. SoFi has been gaining popularity. And fintech companies including PayPal and Square parent Block have been adding more banking services to their portfolios.
Within BNPL, there’s Affirm and Klarna, which held its IPO last month.
Laplanche said Upgrade’s focus in BNPL has been in the travel industry, through relationships with airlines, cruise lines, car rental companies and hotels.
“It’s a pretty specific industry that’s different from retail, where Klarna and Affirm are stronger,” he said.
Technology
PayPal’s crypto partner mints a whopping $300 trillion worth of stablecoins in ‘technical error’
A Paypal logo is seen displayed on a smartphone next to cryptocurrency coins.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Paxos, the blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of the online payment giant’s stablecoin on Wednesday in what the company called a “technical error.”
Market watchers had spotted the enormous injection of the PayPal PYUSD stablecoin on Etherscan — a block explorer and analytics platform for the Ethereum blockchain.
Paxos had mistakenly minted the stablecoins as part of an internal transfer, before it “immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD,” the company said in a social media statement.
“This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause,” it added. PayPal didn’t respond to an inquiry from CNBC outside of regular business hours.
Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after about 20 minutes.
PYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal says the tokens are always redeemable for U.S. dollars on a 1:1 basis.
However, the technical error highlights that the dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and its independent third-party attestation reports, rather than intrinsically tied to the minting of a stablecoin.
There aren’t enough dollars in global circulation to back $300 trillion PYUSD, which would theoretically require more than double the world’s estimated total GDP.
Paxos’ error comes at a time when stablecoins are becoming more mainstream as its adopted by an increasing number of banks and payment platforms.
PYUSD is currently the sixth-largest stablecoin in the world with a market capitalization of over $2.6 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
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