OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and its subsequent popularity caught Google executives off-guard, prompting a sweeping response in the ensuing months.

In February 2024, Bard and Duet AI, another artificial intelligence product from Google, were unified under the Gemini brand, coinciding with the launch of an Android app.

"[36] Tom Warren of The Verge and Davey Alba of Bloomberg News noted that this marked the beginning of another clash between the two Big Tech companies over "the future of search", after their six-year "truce" expired in 2021;[31][37] Chris Stokel-Walker of The Guardian, Sara Morrison of Recode, and analyst Dan Ives of investment firm Wedbush Securities labeled this an AI arms race between the two.

[43][44] Google employees criticized Pichai's "rushed" and "botched" announcement of Bard on Memgen, the company's internal forum,[45] while Maggie Harrison of Futurism called the rollout "chaos".

Pichai defended his actions by saying that Google had been "deeply working on AI for a long time", rejecting the notion that Bard's launch was a knee-jerk reaction.

[24] In the following weeks, Google employees roundly criticized Bard in internal messages, citing a variety of safety and ethical concerns and calling on company leaders not to launch the service.

Prioritizing keeping up with competitors, Google executives decided to proceed with the launch anyway, overruling a negative risk assessment report conducted by its AI ethics team.

[50] After Pichai suddenly laid off 12,000 employees later that month due to slowing revenue growth, remaining workers shared memes and snippets of their humorous exchanges with Bard soliciting its "opinion" on the layoffs.

Unlike Microsoft's approach with Bing Chat, Bard was launched as a standalone web application featuring a text box and a disclaimer that the chatbot "may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views".

[57] Bard is trained by third-party contractors hired by Google, including Appen and Accenture workers, whom Business Insider and Bloomberg News reported were placed under extreme pressure, overworked, and underpaid.

[63] Meanwhile, a senior software engineer at the company published an internal memo warning that Google was falling behind in the AI "arms race", not to OpenAI but to independent researchers in open-source communities.

[67][68] Microsoft also began running advertisements in the address bar of a developer build of the Edge browser, urging users to try Bing whenever they visit the Bard web app.

[101][102] Gemini again took center stage at the 2024 Google I/O keynote,[103][104] with traditionally emphasized topics such as Android 15 and the Pixel 8a relegated to separate events the next day and prior week, respectively.

[115] James Vincent of The Verge found it faster than ChatGPT and Bing Chat, but noted that the lack of Bing-esque footnotes was "both a blessing and a curse",[55] encouraging Google to be bolder when experimenting with AI.

[118] Cade Metz of The New York Times described Gemini as "more cautious" than ChatGPT,[119] while Shirin Ghaffary of Vox called it "dry and uncontroversial" due to the reserved nature of its responses.

[125] In a 60 Minutes conversation with Hsiao, Google senior vice president James Manyika, and Pichai, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley found Gemini "unsettling".

[129] A report published by the Associated Press cautioned that Gemini and other chatbots were prone to generate "false and misleading information that threaten[ed] to disenfranchise voters".

[131][132][133] The business magnate Elon Musk, whose company xAI operates the chatbot Grok, was among those who criticized Google, denouncing its suite of products as biased and racist.

[140][141][142] Raghavan released a lengthy statement addressing the controversy, explaining that Gemini had "overcompensate[d]" amid its efforts to strive for diversity and acknowledging that the images were "embarrassing and wrong".

[149][150] Hassabis stated that Gemini's ability to generate images of people would be restored within two weeks;[151][152][153] it was ultimately relaunched in late August, powered by its new Imagen 3 model.

[164] Hugging Face scientist Sasha Luccioni and Surrey University professor Alan Woodward believed that the incident had "deeply embedded" roots in Gemini's training corpus and algorithms, making it difficult to rectify.

[166] New York magazine contributor John Herrman wrote: "It's a spectacular unforced error, a slapstick rake-in-the-face moment, and a testament to how panicked Google must be by the rise of OpenAI and the threat of AI to its search business.

[158][187][188] The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote that Gemini's "apparently ingrained woke biases" were "fueling a backlash toward AI on the political right, which is joining the left in calling for more regulation.

[191] In France, Google was fined €250 million by the competition regulator Autorité de la concurrence under the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, in part due to its cited failure to inform local news publishers of when their content was used for Gemini's training.

[193] In November 2024, CBS News reported that Gemini had responded to a college student in Michigan asking for help with homework in a threatening manner; Google blamed the incident on hallucination and took "action to prevent similar outputs from occurring".