Sergey Brin says Google 'definitely messed up' after its Gemini chatbot caused a firestorm. He has a lot riding on its success — or failure.

• Sergey Brin says Google "definitely messed up" with Gemini's image generation.
• He was listed as a "core contributor" to Gemini in a December white paper.
• The Google cofounder says he came out of retirement because of AI's "exciting" trajectory.

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has weighed in on the company's Gemini drama.

Speaking at San Francisco's AGI House, Brin said the company had "definitely messed up on the image generation." He added the historically inaccurate images generated by Gemini were likely due to a lack of thorough testing.

Google paused Gemini's image-generating feature last month after users complained it was creating strange images of people of color, including pictures depicting black Nazis. Google's AI model also faced criticism for some of its written responses.

Despite stepping back from Google in 2019, Brin was listed as a "core contributor" to Gemini in a December white paper outlining its capabilities.

Brin and fellow cofounder Larry Page have reportedly been more active at the company since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022.

In January 2023, The New York Times first reported that Google owner Alphabet asked the cofounders for help after issuing a "code red" in response to OpenAI's viral chatbot.

Since then, Brin has been spotted at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters and has been directly involved with developing the company's AI strategy.

Brin told the audience at the AGI house: "I kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting."

Google's been feeling the heat in the wake of the Gemini controversy.

Some critics have used the drama as evidence that left-leaning bias among Big Tech employees has affected the output of major AI models.

Elon Musk has been especially vocal with his criticism, frequently pointing to an example where the bot appeared to be unable to say if he or Adolf Hitler were worse. When BI tested the same prompt at a later date, Gemini said it was "inaccurate and grossly inappropriate" to compare Musk with Hitler.

Brin appeared to push back on some of the criticism around the text-based model. He told the audience that any text model available, including ChatGPT or Musk's Grok, would be likely to say some "pretty weird things" that "definitely feel far-left, for example" if put under pressure.

Brin added that Google hasn't fully understood why Gemini leans left in some cases and said that was not the company's intention.

Representatives for Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.