Google’s Parent company Alphabet Inc. lost $100 billion in market value. After its new AI chatbot ‘Bard’ gives inaccurate information in a promotional ad. Shares of Alphabet plunged as much as 9 per cent during Wednesday’s trading session. But rose slightly to settle at 7.68 per cent lower. This drop in share value came after news agency Reuters pointed out an error in Google’s advertisement for its new chatbot Bard. The chatbot officially debuted on Monday.
The company has been working hard to release ‘Bard’ after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November. OpenAI is a startup backed up by Microsoft. Since its arrival ChatGPT an artificial intelligence-based chatbot has taken the tech world by storm for its human-like responses.
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Google AI Bot “Bard”: Where Did It All Go Wrong
Alphabet shared a short GIF video of Bard in action on Twitter, promising that it would help simplify complex topics. However, the bot ended up giving a wrong answer resulting in a sharp drop in its market value. In the ad, the AI was asked the question- what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about? To this, the Bot gave a number of answers. Including one suggesting that JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system or exoplanets.
However, according to NASA, the first pictures of exoplanets were by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004. Gil Luria, senior software analyst at DA Davidson told the news agency Reuters that Google has been a leader in AI innovation for several years. And they seemed to have fallen asleep on implementing this technology into their search product. With this, the shares of Google’s parent company tumbled. However, Microsoft rose around 3 per cent on Wednesday and settled flat in post-market trading. Besides the error, the fact that Microsoft remains a step ahead of Google in the AI chatbot race also impacted Alphabet’s share price.
Moreover, a Google spokesperson said, “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.” Additionally, Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it would launch a new version of its search engine, Bing. Utilizing the same technology underpinning ChatGPT to help inform user search queries.
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Sneha Bhabar
An introvert who loves learning and experimenting with new things.