Google has postponed the public release of its much-touted AI chatbot ‘Gemini’ to January over reported issues in responding to non-English queries reliably.
CEO Sundar Pichai decided to push back this week’s scheduled launch to allow more fine-tuning of the system, as per an internal email revealed by The Information.
This comes barely a month after Pichai asked teams to fast-track Gemini’s release to compete with chatbots like OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT.
Google aimed to leapfrog ChatGPT with Gemini, its first conversational AI bot built from scratch to seamlessly understand multi-modal inputs like text, images, and videos.
However, handling non-English languages has emerged as a persisting challenge in the final testing stages – an area where human oversight still outweighs AI comprehension currently.
“We’re already at work on Gemini – our next model created for multimodal efficiency and innovations like memory and planning,” Google had said earlier regarding its AI aspirations.
The delay indicates how achieving robustness across languages remains a key obstacle, even for tech giants like Google, in launching reliable chatbots.
It also gives rival OpenAI more leeway after its CEO Sam Altman got reinstated following an employee rebellion over his controversial removal from the board last month.
