Google AI chatbot Bard gives wrong answer, sending shares plummeting

In the wake of Microsoft’s ChatGPT, Google is trying to jump into action with its own chatbot, Bard, but an actual bug in the AI ​​engine has just cost the tech giant an estimated $100 billion in losses dollars.

In a promotional clip shared by Google on Monday, the AI ​​chatbot was extensively asked: “What new discoveries can I tell my nine-year-old from the James Webb Space Telescope?” Bard responded with several bullet points, one of which read: “JWST took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system.”

Online experts were quick to point out the error. Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the American Center for Astrophysics, responded to Google on Twitter, writing, “Not an idiot ~ah, actually~, and I’m sure Bard is. would be great, but in terms of records:
JWST did not take “the first image of a planet outside our solar system”.

According to NASA, the first image of a planet outside our solar system was taken in 2004 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

Shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, then fell 7.7% on Wednesday, resulting in a market value loss of more than $100 billion, according to Bloomberg. The shift is the most severe stock decline the company has seen in more than three months, as Alphabet’s October 2022 earnings report showed digital ad revenue is decelerating.

By contrast, shares of Microsoft rose 4.2% on Tuesday after the tech giant announced that ChatGPT would be used to improve and power the Bing search engine. A Google spokesperson told CNN in a statement Wednesday that Bard’s bug “underlines the importance of a rigorous testing process, which we’ll be rolling out this week with the Tester program.” our trust.”

“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure Bard’s feedback is high-quality, secure, and based on real-world information,”

While Bard has yet to go public, the company says the chatbot will launch in the “next few weeks”.

Bing, even with the implementation of ChatGPT, is probably still far from becoming a serious threat to Google, which accounts for about 90% of the Internet market.

“This is not the end of the world for Google, and Microsoft is going to have lunch in search,”

“But ChatGPT shows there is a possible threat and it causes a lot of fear.”

CFRA analyst Angelo Zino.

Google’s Bard is very similar to ChatGPT in that users post questions, ask questions, or give prompts to get a human-like response.

ChatGPT, which went public last November, can be anything users do with it – it can act as a chef and provide recipes and business plans to homeowners. marketing, creating press releases for PR professionals or giving advice as a therapist.

Like Microsoft, Google plans to integrate artificial intelligence tools into Google Search, which accounts for a large portion of the company’s revenue. The biggest difference between ChatGPT and Bard is Bard’s ability to include recent events in the response. Bard will rely on information from the internet, while ChatGPT has access to data from various sources (as of 2021).

Both tools are built on a large language model, but experts have long feared that AI systems could lead to the spread of misinformation. However, with further development, AI experts believe that these tools can learn to distinguish correct information from incorrect information.

“We will see an era of incredible experimentation, and probably fairly rapidly convergence to the tools that are actually meeting the needs of the people who are meant to use them,”

Mark Daley, chief digital information officer at Western University, previously told Global News.