Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced on Monday that the company intends to resume its AI tool, which generates images of individuals, in the next weeks. The program was put on hold last week due to inconsistencies in some historical renderings.
Earlier this month, Google, a division of Alphabet, started providing image production using its Gemini AI models. On social media, however, a few users pointed out that it occasionally produced erroneous historical images.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks”, Hassabis said in a panel in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The tool was not “working the way we intended”, he added.
Alphabet’s shares were down 3.5% on Monday afternoon, the biggest drag on the benchmark S&P 500 index.
Since the launch of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT in November 2022, Google has been racing to produce AI software to rival that of the Microsoft-backed company.
When Google released its generative AI chatbot Bard a year ago, it had shared inaccurate information about pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system in a promotional video, causing its shares to drop by as much as 9%.
Bard was renamed Gemini earlier this month and Google rolled out paid subscription plans, which users could choose for better reasoning capabilities from the AI model.
“We are in the early stages of generative AI development but if the glitches or inaccuracies persist, that’s when people start to worry,” said Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research.
