Elon Musk Escalates His War With Google After Latest AI Accusations

Those who follow Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter) might have noticed that the tech billionaire has been growing increasingly critical of Google over the past week. It seems that most of his ire has been focused on the company's new AI, Gemini. Google has designed this AI to be one of the most advanced generative learning models available (though it may not be ready to replace your digital assistant just yet). 

One of the things that separates it from other AI is the fact that it's multimodal, which means that it can understand and translate several different kinds of information, including text, code, audio, images, and video. Even so, the recent developments in machine learning technology have sent many tech companies scrambling to come up with their own AI software. So what is it about Gemini that has caused it to garner so much of Musk's attention?

Musk's earliest comments about the platform came on the heels of Google being forced to put a pause on Gemini's image generation software. Early users of the software complained that it was "too woke" upon noticing that it had a tendency to produce racially diverse images, even when given historical prompts such as one to produce an image of the American Founding Fathers and another to make an image of Nazis. Musk's comments seem to indicate that not only does he agree, but that he believes this is the seed of a greater, systemic issue with the platform.

It's no secret that Elon Musk believes so-called "woke culture" is problematic. He has made innumerable public statements on the subject and has, in no uncertain terms, made it clear that he believes this political mindset to be toxic. On February 22, following the launch of Gemini, Musk tweeted, "The woke mind virus is killing Western Civilization. Google does the same thing with their search results. Facebook & Instagram too. And Wikipedia." He implied that he'll release his own Gmail alternative and there's a persistent rumor about him creating his own search engine.

Musk has added several new charges to the list over recent days: he has accused Gemini of being racist and sexist and also claimed that he spoke on the phone with a Google executive who said it would take a few months to fix it. In a tweet recounting the alleged conversation, Musk claims his response was "that I doubted that Google's woke bureaucratic blob would *allow* him to fix it." He also declared, "Unless those who caused this are exited from Google, nothing will change, except to make the bias less obvious and more pernicious."

His other posts on the subject have also become increasingly alarmist. He shared a meme with the heading "What's the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth? About 6 months," and he has stated that "our whole civilization is at stake." It doesn't just seem to be Google that he's going after, though. He also recently complained about Windows requiring users to make a Microsoft account when they set up a new PC and suggested that this would give the company's AI access to his computer.