By Alistair Barr
Publication Date: 2025-11-22 00:21:00
In 2017, Google was criticized for a bad emoji. This week, CEO Sundar Pichai fixed it. How he did this says a lot about the progress Google has made in generative AI.
The internet giant schooled the rest of the tech industry when it launched its latest model, Gemini 3, on Tuesday. It followed that up by rolling out an upgraded image-generation tool called Nano Banana Pro, which is churning out impressive, realistic pictures, diagrams, and charts.
Google proved that AI scaling laws still work, just as its rivals are being questioned. The stock jumped to a record, making the company worth more than Microsoft.
This is all a long way from 2017. Back then, Google rolled out a cheeseburger emoji for Android smartphones. It had the cheese under the meat. Absolute scandal.
I think we need to have a discussion about how Google’s burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top pic.twitter.com/PgXmCkY3Yc
— Thomas Baekdal…
