Google’s parent company’s stock dropped more than $100 billion in value on Wednesday after its Bard chatbot ad displayed incorrect information and analysts said its AI search event lacked details on how it will respond to Microsoft’s ChatGPT challenge.
The error in Google’s advertisement, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system was discovered by Reuters. Alphabet shares fell 8%, or $8.59 per share, to $99.05 and were one of the most actively traded on U.S. exchanges.
The tech giant tweeted a short GIF video of Bard in action, describing the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help simplify complex topics, but it delivered an incorrect answer that was discovered just hours before Bard’s launch event in Paris.
In the advertisement, Google’s Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”
Bard responds with a number of answers, one of which suggests that the JWST was used to take the first images of planets outside the Earth’s solar system, known as exoplanets. This is incorrect, as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) captured the first images of exoplanets in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
Google’s announcement came just one day after Microsoft announced plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products, posing a significant challenge to Google, which has long outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.
The error was spotted hours before the Paris launch, where senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised that users would use the technology to interact with information in “entirely new ways”.
On Wednesday, Raghavan introduced Bard as the company’s future, telling audience members that “the only limit to search will be your imagination” by utilising generative AI.
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