The world saw a jaw-dropping demo of Gemini this week. It just wasn’t the real deal.

1. 12/8/23, 10:31 PM
Google’s Gemini Marketing Trick
Page 1 of 2
https://www.thewrap.com/google-gemini-ai-marketing-trick/
Google’s Gemini Marketing Trick
Alex Kantrowitz December 8, 2023 @ 1:00 PM
Google really didn’t have to exaggerate. When the company introduced
Gemini this week — its stunning new AI model that beat OpenAI on
multiple benchmarks and understands both text and images — it delivered
a product that lived up to months of hype. Yet, as the company showed it
to the world, it embellished.
In a viral video demonstrating Gemini’s capabilities, Google
took significant artistic license. It showed a user speaking with Gemini, but
it was actually representing a text conversation. It showed a moving video,
but was feeding Gemini still images. It showed fast responses, but sped
those up. It showed tight model outputs, but shortened them “for brevity.”
It showed brief prompts eliciting terrific answers, but listed longer prompts
in a blog post.
Exaggerating in tech demos isn’t novel, but Google’s Gemini video felt
different. As it circulated among developers and industry watchers this
week, the sentiment was near universal: Google, whose research made
the generative AI era possible, was pressing.
“It’s a little bit shocking that Google, the undisputed pioneer in generative
AI, would feel it necessary to juice the results of their demo just to try and
one up Microsoft/OpenAI,” said Malcolm Ethridge, an executive vice
president at CIC Wealth. “But it also speaks to just how important it is to
be seen as a legitimate competitor — let alone be the eventual winner of
this arms race in AI.”
Google’s had a weird year. Microsoft used technology it developed — the
transformer model — to build a marquee offering with OpenAI. Meta used
it to build credibility in the open-source AI movement. NVIDIA used it to
add more than $500 billion to its market cap. All these efforts threaten

2. 12/8/23, 10:31 PM
Google’s Gemini Marketing Trick
Page 2 of 2
https://www.thewrap.com/google-gemini-ai-marketing-trick/
Google’s long-term dominance in search.
Gemini, arriving on the heels of OpenAI’s chaos, was Google’s long-
awaited answer. But the pressure to deliver something revolutionary
seemed to build, and its marketing lost touch with reality. The unforced
error spoke loudly.
Google made the video to “inspire developers,” said Oriol Vinyals, a
Deepmind vice president. But it may have had the opposite effect for
some. Developers on the tech forum Hacker News kept the video on its
front page throughout Thursday, and were not happy about it. “I was
fooled,” wrote one user. “It’s one thing to release a hype video with what-
ifs and quite another to claim that your new multi-modal model is king of
the hill then game all the benchmarks and fake all the demos.”
Vinyals said the prompts and outputs in the video were real, with some
shortened. And he posted a video that showed some of the brief prompts
working exactly like the longer, more detailed ones in the blog post. But
his response didn’t seem to satisfy the masses. “Ah, the age-old art of
deceptive demos,” said IBM Fellow Grady Booch, quoting Vinyals. “Dear
Google: you should have made this abundantly clear.”
Gemini remains an impressive product. While it won’t roll out fully until
next year, it’ll have an advantage serving customers on Google Cloud
Platform, many of whom already have their data in the service, as Margins’
Ranjan Roy said in Wednesday’s edition of The Panel. For Google, it’s
good to finally have Gemini in the wild.
As for the marketing, while it flopped with developers and the company’s
closest watchers, one important constituency seems to have bought in.
Alphabet stock jumped 5% following the announcement.