With 5 Words, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai Just Responded to Intense Criticism Over the Company’s Gemini Debacle

If you’re the CEO of Google–the company that says its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” the last week has been especially rough. That’s because, last week, Google paused the image creation feature in its generative AI product, Gemini, when users noticed how it handled images related to people and race. 

For example, if you asked Gemini to show you a photo of “German soldiers in 1943,” it would return an image that included Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans wearing military uniforms. That is, for obvious reasons, problematic. Further prompts revealed that Gemini considered requests to create images of white males to be sensitive and would refuse. 

It turns out that the reason is quite simple. I wrote previously about Google’s explanation that Gemini would insert prompts to ensure that the results it gave were inclusive and more representative of a diverse population. That’s not an unreasonable goal. The problem is that if you want people to count on you to provide accurate information, you should show images that reflect the historical context of whatever a person is asking for. 

More than one observer questioned whether Pichai would even be able to continue as CEO after such a major debacle with what is arguably Google’s most important product moving forward. That’s not an unreasonable argument. Google botched Gemini so badly that it was reflective of a broken culture inside the company. Ultimately, that’s on the CEO. 

Now, Pichai has finally responded. In a memo to employees, that was viewed by The Verge, Pichai addressed the “problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app,” and called them “unacceptable.”

“We got it wrong,” he wrote.

Pichai didn’t specifically apologize for what happened, but there were the usual words about fixing what went wrong. On the one hand, you can argue that what he said carries less weight because he had no choice. He had to say something. On the other hand, what he did say was what he should say. In fact, Pichai ends the memo with one of the most important lessons for every leader:

“We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the Al wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”

Read those last five words again: “deserving of our users’ trust.” That’s it–that’s the lesson. That’s the most important job of anyone designing products.

I’ve said many times that trust, it turns out, is your most valuable asset. Ultimately, that’s the existential risk that Google faces–that it would lose users’ trust. I call the threat existential because Google is only useful to anyone if users can trust that the answers it gives are accurate and relevant. In the case of Gemini, neither was true. 

The thing is, you don’t get trust just because you build something. You have to build something that–as Pichai notes–is “deserving” of that trust. You have to build it in a way that first considers the promise you make to your users. For Google, that promise is that it won’t make up false representations just because they might advance a cultural objective. 

If someone asks for an image of the founding fathers, they probably expect they’ll see a group of white men, regardless of the argument that the lack of diversity among the people who started this country has led to all sorts of systemic problems. That may be true, but it has nothing to do with this particular prompt, and correcting for those problems isn’t the job of an AI chatbot, or of Google.

“We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products,” Pichai wrote. “That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging Al products.”

Clearly, Google failed. Gemini is neither helpful, accurate, nor unbiased. Pichai’s response highlights the work it has cut out for it–getting back to building products “deserving of users’ trust.” 

That’s true not just for Google, but for every business, by the way. It’s true whether you’re trying to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” or if you’re selling whatever it is your company makes.

Ultimately, that’s the bottom line. If you lose the trust of your customers, nothing else matters. You’ve just lost.