United States: Google’s new AI-powered search bot hit a snag and shook investor trust Because it provided false information in a promotional video.
Alphabet, the company that owns Google, saw its market value decline by $100 billion, adding to concerns that Microsoft is gaining ground. Alphabet shares were unchanged after falling as much as 9 percent during regular trading. Shares of Microsoft increased by around 3 percent before retreating and also unchanged in post-market trade.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023
Alphabet Tweeted that a brief gif video showing Bard in action would help to explain complex subjects, but it instead provided an incorrect response. 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 responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by Nasa.
The Bard advertisement had been seen more than a million times on Twitter as of the time of writing. Just prior to Google’s presentation, which also failed to impress investors, Bard’s inaccuracy was found. OpenAI, a business that Microsoft is investing about $10 billion, released software in November that has amazed users and becomes a craze in Silicon Valley circles for its unexpectedly accurate and well-written responses to straightforward questions.