Alphabet Stock Dives as Employees Question Gemini 4 AI Model

Alphabet's stock slipped on Wednesday as it headed towards market close, paring its gains to 0.5% from over 2%. This reversal came after a Bloomberg report highlighted internal employee doubts about the performance of Google's upcoming Gemini 4 artificial intelligence model.

The report stated that while Gemini 4 performed well on industry benchmarks, it struggled with real-world coding tasks. However, Google disputed this characterization, citing comments made by Koray Kavukcuoglu, head of Google DeepMind, who said he was encouraged by the model's performance.

According to the report, some employees believe Anthropic's Fable and OpenAI's Astra models are improving at a faster rate than Gemini. Others think Gemini 4 has caught up with leading AI labs. A Google employee familiar with model development told Bloomberg that there is 'large consensus' internally that Gemini 4 is at the frontier.

The report also mentioned that Google had planned to release a different version, dubbed Gemini 3.5 Pro, in June but abandoned the effort.