Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlights Google’s AI revival with a cheeseburger throwback

Google has turned an old internet debate into a symbol of its technological resurgence. This week, CEO Sundar Pichai revived the 2017 Android cheeseburger emoji controversy to illustrate how far the company has come in generative AI — and why its latest breakthroughs matter beyond online humour.

The original debate erupted eight years ago when users pointed out that Google’s burger emoji placed the cheese beneath the patty, unlike competitors. The issue quickly triggered a wave of jokes and memes, ultimately prompting Pichai to acknowledge the matter with a light-hearted promise to fix it.

Fast forward to 2025, and that same emoji misstep has become the centerpiece of Google’s message about its renewed AI strength. Following the launch of Gemini 3 — the company’s newest generative model — and the upgraded Nano Banana Pro image generator, Pichai shared an AI-generated cheeseburger image showing the cheese firmly placed above the patty. He captioned it “iykyk,” a nudge to anyone who remembers the old debate.

For Google, this callback is more than nostalgia. It is a demonstration of what the company describes as a major leap in spatial understanding — something generative AI has long struggled with. The company says Gemini 3 is significantly better at placing objects correctly in 3D space when generating images, diagrams, or structural layouts. The cheeseburger example, though humorous, serves as a simple but effective illustration of this advancement.
The improvement caught the attention of tech investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, who publicly noted that spatial orientation has been a notable weakness across AI models. In his view, Gemini 3’s accuracy in something as trivial as a burger image signals potential applications in more consequential scenarios.

Srinivasan highlighted that if AI can determine where cheese belongs in a burger, it may also be able to determine where components belong in engineering environments, safety planning, manufacturing layouts, or urban infrastructure. He suggested that such spatial precision could eventually guide real-world decision-making down to extremely fine measurements.
The timing of Google’s new releases is equally important. Over the past two years, the company has faced repeated questions about whether it had fallen behind rivals in generative AI. The rollout of Gemini 3 appears to be Google’s attempt to firmly settle that debate. The company said the new model scales better, reasons more effectively, and renders images more accurately than previous versions.