Google is pausing the rollout of its AI-powered “Ask Images” characteristic inside Google Images, which has been slowly increasing since last fall. “Ask Images isn’t the place it must be,” wrote Jamie Aspinall, a product supervisor for Google Images, in a post on X responding to criticism, citing three components: latency, high quality, and consumer expertise.
The experimental characteristic is powered by Google’s “most capable” Gemini AI fashions. Particularly, it’s a specialised model of its Gemini fashions which can be “solely used for Ask Images,” in accordance with Google.
Aspinall stated Google had paused the characteristic’s rollout “at very small numbers whereas we deal with these points,” and that in about two weeks, the workforce would ship a greater model “that brings again the pace and recall of the unique search.
On the identical time, Google also announced Tuesday that key phrase search in Images is getting higher, permitting you to make use of quotes to search out precise textual content matches inside “filenames, digital camera fashions, captions, or textual content inside photographs,” or search with out quotes to incorporate visible matches too.
Google introduced the characteristic last May at I/O 2024, and positioned it as a strategy to question your Images app for commonsense questions that one other human would sometimes have to assist with — i.e., asking about which themes you’ve chosen prior to now for a kid’s party, or which nationwide parks you’ve visited.
“Gemini’s multimodal capabilities will help perceive precisely what’s taking place in every photograph and might even learn textual content within the picture if required,” the corporate wrote within the announcement. “Ask Images then crafts a useful response and picks which photographs and movies to return.”
It’s not the primary time Google has paused the rollout of an AI-powered characteristic, because it competes in a shortly intensifying AI arms race in opposition to different tech giants and startups alike.
Final Might, inside weeks of debuting “AI Overview” in Google Search, Google paused the characteristic after nonsensical and inaccurate solutions went viral on social media, with no strategy to choose out of utilization. Two high-profile examples: The characteristic referred to as Barack Obama the primary Muslim president of america, and beneficial customers put glue on pizza to maintain the cheese on.
And final February, Google rolled out Gemini’s image-generation device with a great deal of fanfare, then paused the feature that same month after customers reported historic inaccuracies, akin to an AI-generated picture depicting the U.S. Founding Fathers as folks of coloration.