The market value of Google’s parent company’s shares dropped by more than $100 billion on Wednesday as a result of the Bard chatbot advertisement providing incorrect information and the AI search event’s lack of information regarding how it will respond to Microsoft’s ChatGPT challenge, according to analysts.
The mistake in Google’s advertising, which aired on Monday, about which satellite first captured images of a planet outside of the solar system, was first brought to light by a media publication. The parent company Alphabet’s shares, which were among the most actively traded on US exchanges, decreased 8%, or $8.59 per share, to $99.05.
A few hours before the Bard launch event in Paris, the tech giant tweeted a brief GIF video of Bard in operation, portraying the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help demystify complicated themes. However, Bard gave an incorrect response.
The announcement by Microsoft that it will include its competing AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products the day before Google’s event was a significant challenge to Microsoft, which has long lagged behind Google in terms of search and browser technology.
“This is a hiccup here and they’re severely punishing the stock for it, which is justified because obviously everybody is pretty excited to see what Google’s going to counter with Microsoft coming out with a pretty decent product,” said Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Triple D Trading.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard offers several responses, one of which claims that the JWST was used to capture the first images of exoplanets or worlds outside the solar system. This is untrue because, as NASA has confirmed, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory took the first images of exoplanets in 2004.
“This underlines the significance of a thorough testing process, something we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester programme,” a Google representative said.
“To ensure that Bard’s responses reach a high standard for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world knowledge, we’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing.”
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