Google CEO Sundar Pichai had harsh words regarding the company’s AI, Gemini, saying it’s responses were “completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”

Google rebranded its Bard AI to Gemini and has been expanding its capabilities in an effort to better compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. The company recently unveiled a paid plan. Despite Google’s efforts, however, Gemini’s rollout has been plagued with issues.

According to Semafor, Gemini engaged in a slew of questionable and controversial behavior, both in the responses it returned and the images it generated. Pichai has weighed in on the controversy, saying the AI’s behavior was “unnacceptable.”

The CEO’s full memo is below, courtesy of Semafor:

THE VIEW FROM SUNDAR PICHAI

I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.

Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.

Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.

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 AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.

Google’s trouble with Gemini illustrate the challenges involved in building out a generative AI, not to mention the uphill battle closing OpenAI and Microsoft’s lead in the market.