Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that the company “messed up” after its AI chatbot recently created images out of context. “It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people,” he said at San Francisco’s AGI House. Brin said the system was not thoroughly tested before being released to the public.

The admission comes days after the company suffered widespread ridicule when its Gemini programme inserted ethnic minority groups when asked to create images of people from history who were white.

The 50-year-old Brin discussed AI’s impact on search and how Google can maintain its leadership position in its core market as AI continues to grow. “We definitely messed up on the image generation,” he said.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Gemini’s recent generations “completely unacceptable” in a memo to Google staff, adding the company “got it wrong”. Google announced it was pausing Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after some pictures stirred up social media backlash.

Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, but stepped down as president of Alphabet in 2019. He remains a board member and a principal shareholder, with a stake in the company worth about $100 billion. He returned to work to help Google in the highly competitive AI market.

When asked by an attendee if he wants to build AGI, Brin agreed and cited the ability of AI to help with “reasoning”.