$67 billion lost from @Alphabet’s market capitalization today, with the stock down 3.8% at 3 ET.
It took the market a while to figure out just how serious the @Google #Gemini launch fiasco is for the company.
#LLMs threaten to erode Google’s bread-and-butter business, search, threatening the existence of the company in its current form. In order to be future-proof, the company needs an LLM that is on par with @OpenAI’s #ChatGPT and produces objective and true answers.
Gemini is not that due to the political bias built into it by its dev team.
Gemini needs to be fixed. The question is, is Google capable of doing so? Political bias among Google employees, including senior leadership, may be so pervasive that they may not appreciate the seriousness of the issue, or may not be able to fix it. If that were so, we would see a Gemini reboot in a while with political bias reduced, but not excised. This would keep Google at a competitive disadvantage and put its future at risk.
But assuming at least senior leadership acknowledges Google is in serious crisis, here is what Google should do:
– Dissolve the Gemini team, bring on a new team and leadership, possibly from the outside, and make them swear to political neutrality. Perhaps make it a skunkworks to insulate it from Google politics.
– Review and fix senior oversight of the Gemini group. How could the Gemini disaster have happened in the first place?
– Take Gemini down to the studs and start from scratch. Have an independent red team test the product.
– Dump the “Gemini” name since it now has “Ford Edsel” vibes.
– Recommit the entire company to a new mission: “Our mission used to be, collect all the world’s information. In that mission, we have succeeded. Our new mission now is to make that information as easily accessible as possible via #AI. We will present that information truthfully, objectively and neutrally. Every Google employee is entitled to their own political opinions. But they are not entitled to bring them into work.”
– Lay off 25% of the staff. Google is famously bloated, bogging down innovation and productivity.
It will take months to fix Gemini, and it will not be done with fine-tuning.
W Media Research 