When creatives put a fictional spin on history, you get Bridgerton or Inglourious Basterds—but when Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, revises real events, you get a $90-billion single-day market loss.

“We got it wrong,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo about Gemini’s current issues with biased answers and racially inaccurate images. The statement comes after widespread criticism led parent company Alphabet to suffer its second-steepest single-day drop in a year on Monday.

ICYMI…Gemini got dragged last week for overdiversifying answers to historical questions by spitting out pictures including an Asian founding father, a female pope, and a Black Nazi. Google suspended Gemini’s ability to generate images of people last Thursday, but users realized something was also awry with the AI’s text-based answers over the weekend after the bot refused to say if Adolf Hitler had a worse impact on the world than Elon Musk.

Now, some people think Gemini has the woke mind virus. Since the fiasco began, Musk fired off several tweets promoting the theory that Google’s generative tech is racist against white people, according to Bloomberg opinion columnist Parmy Olson.

But…Olson and Semafor’s Reed Albergotti see the flubs as overcorrections of previous racial bias and as consequences of Google’s efforts to rush out fixes for Gemini’s algorithm.

No time to waste

Gemini’s image generation capabilities should be restored in the next few weeks, Google says, but public perception will be harder to debug.

Somebody’s probably kicking themselves: More than two years ago, Google failed to prioritize an AI chatbot created by two employees who tried to push the company to develop it. Now, it’s playing catch-up.

Big picture: Expectations are high for Google, so analysts warn that AI missteps could easily undermine trust in the company’s brand and business. But with Microsoft and OpenAI leading the generative tech space, Google has likely doubled down on moving fast and breaking things.—ML

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Mitch McConnell to step down as Senate GOP leader. McConnell, the longest-serving party leader ever in the Senate, said yesterday that he’ll give up his leadership position after the presidential election in November. His decision that it’s “time for the next generation of leadership” comes after the 82-year-old Kentucky politician’s health has been in the news after two recent episodes of freezing up while speaking publicly and as the old-school Republican has clashed with Donald Trump and his supporters.

Trump’s immunity claims head to the high court. The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to weigh in on Donald Trump’s assertions that he is immune from being prosecuted for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election because he was president at the time. The justices will hear arguments in April, giving the court the final word on the novel legal issue. Though a decision is expected in June, it delays one of the criminal cases against Trump as the 2024 election approaches. In other legal news about the former president, an Illinois judge ruled he can’t appear on the state’s primary ballot because of the ban on insurrectionists, but paused the decision pending Trump’s likely appeal.

SCOTUS seems split on gun case. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday challenging a Trump-era federal ban on bump stocks, accessories that make semi-automatic rifles shoot more quickly. The justices appeared divided over whether it should be upheld. The ban was enacted after a shooter using the device killed 58 people in Las Vegas in 2017. The case doesn’t ask the court to interpret the Second Amendment and instead hinges on whether the ban can stand under a law forbidding machine guns.

Here’s a strong case for staying friends with people from high school: California Gov. Gavin Newsom may have pushed for Panera Bread to get an exemption to the state’s new $20 minimum wage law because of a long-standing relationship (and donorship) with fast-food restaurateur Greg Flynn, according to Bloomberg.

Jog your memory: Last year, Newsom signed a law to raise the minimum wage for the state’s fast-food workers from $16 to $20/hour starting this April. But there was one mystifying exemption: fast-food chains that sell bread as a standalone item—like Panera.

Newsom said the oddly specific rule came about due to “the sausage-making” of politics, but that sausage might have been wrapped in puff pastry. Per Bloomberg:

• Flynn owns 24 Panera Bread locations in California.
• Flynn and Newsom attended the same high school, where they overlapped for one year. Flynn has also donated at least $164k to Newsom’s political campaigns.

Flynn said that he played no role in creating the bread exemption, and Panera Bread didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment.

Bottom line: Industry experts say Panera Bread will probably still have to increase wages to compete with the chains that are offering more money to workers. Some of the Panera Bread locations owned by Flynn recently posted job openings with $20 hourly pay.—CC

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It’s not just your single friends frustrated with the state of dating apps. Bumble said this week that it plans to lay off 30% of its staff (about 350 employees) after a Q4 earnings report highlighted that profits are ghosting the company and Gen Z considers dating apps a turnoff.

Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones, who took over in November when founder Whitney Wolfe Herd stepped down, said the cuts would save the company around $55 million. The company plans to invest in relaunching the app next quarter with new safety and AI features to woo Gen Zers looking for love.

It’s no easy task: Everyone’s losing interest in swiping for a soulmate, especially young people.

• In an October Axios/Generation Lab survey, 79% of college and grad students said they don’t use dating apps.
• Meanwhile, 41% of users age 30+ said they’ve paid for dating apps, compared to just 22% of users under 30, according to a Pew Research study last year.

Rebrands everywhere: Bumble’s competitors are scrambling to innovate, too. Tinder is trying to shake its hookup reputation, and Hinge (along with other apps) is investing in in-person meetups.—MM

Stat: The Toyota Prius may have gotten a makeover in recent years to help shed its image as the car for people who consider granola its own food group, but it’s still got the environmental bona fides. The nonprofit American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy ranked the plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius Prime SE the greenest car you can buy in the US, beating out even fully electric vehicles. The rankings take into account the pollution cars generate on the road and when being manufactured. The Prius also took the crown in the group’s rankings in 2020 and 2022.

Quote: “In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here.”

The actor hired to play Willy Wonka at a Glasgow event billed as an immersive chocolate experience and advertised with AI-generated images of a whimsical funhouse that in reality turned out to be a mostly empty warehouse with a few props is speaking out. Comedian Paul Connell told The Independent he had nothing to do with organizing the Fyre Fest of candy factories but tried his best to make the event special for the kids who arrived (who were given one jelly bean and a cup of lemonade each) even though the script was “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish.” Connell says he stayed in character for three and a half hours as the scene devolved into chaos until he didn’t know “where I ended and Wonka began.”

Read: How the company created the “Disney Adult.” (The New Statesman)