By Martin Coulter
LONDON (Reuters) – Shares in Google parent Alphabet lost more than $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after the announcement of its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard showed inaccurate information and as analysts hunted more information on how the company will respond to Microsoft’s ChatGPT.
Reuters was the first to point out the error in Google’s ad, which debuted on Monday. The piece shows Brad’s response to a question about what was the first satellite to take pictures of a planet outside our solar system.
At 3:35 pm (Brasília time), Alphabet shares fell 8.03% and were one of the most traded on US stock exchanges.
“This is a setback and they are punishing the stocks severely for this, which is justified because obviously everyone is very excited to see what Google will do,” said Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Google. Triple D Trading, looking at rival Microsoft’s recent moves.
The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, in which it describes the chatbot as a “platform for curiosity” that will help simplify complex topics.
In the announcement, Bard is asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old son about?”
Bard gives several answers, including one suggesting that the telescope was used to take the first pictures of a planet outside Earth’s solar system (so-called exoplanets). This is inaccurate.
The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
The error was spotted hours before Google hosted a launch event for Bard in Paris, where senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised the technology could be used to interact with information in new ways.
Raghavan introduced Bard on Wednesday as the company’s future and told audience members that when using generative artificial intelligence, “the only limit to research will be your imagination.”
A Google spokesperson told Reuters: “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something we are starting this week with our Trusted Tester program.”
“We will combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses meet a high standard of quality, security and grounding in real-world information.”
The event came a day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot into its Bing search engine and other products.
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