On Wednesday, shares of the parent comapny of the search engine Google plummeted and the company lost $ 100 billion in market value as its new chatbot, Bard, displayed false information in a promotional video. According to the reports, Alphabet shares dropped 8 percent, or $ 8.59 a share, to $ 99.05 and continued to be one of the most actively traded on US exchanges.
The saga began as Google debuted an advertisement for Bard on Monday in which a question was asked to the chatbot about a satellite. In the advertisement video, Bard was asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”
Bard responded with a number of answers to this, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
The internet giant tweeted a brief GIF clip of Bard in action, portraying the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help clarify difficult subjects. However, hours before the Bard launch event in Paris, Bard gave an incorrect response. The mistake was first pointed out by Reuters.
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
According to the reports, Google has been compelled to play catch-up since OpenAI, a company Microsoft is investing $10 billion in, unveiled software ChatGPT in November that has amazed users and become a craze in Silicon Valley circles for its unexpectedly accurate and well-written responses to straightforward queries.
Google did not get into specifics regarding how and when it will incorporate Bard into its primary search function during its live-streamed presentation on Wednesday morning. However, Microsoft said at an event the previous day that a ChatGPT-integrated version of their Bing search had already been made available to the public. Microsoft shares rose around 3 percent on Wednesday, and were flat in post-market trading.
Taking the cognizance of the mistake, Google spokesperson highlighted the importance of rigorous testing process before the launch of the product. “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,” he was quoted.
Reports mention that the error was spotted hours before Bard’s Paris launch where senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised that users would use the technology to interact with information in entirely new ways. Raghavan introduced Bard on Wednesday as the future of the company, indictaing the audiences that by using generative AI, the only limit to search will be a human imagination.
A selloff of Alphabet shares knocked $100 billion in market value from Google’s parent company after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video, feeding worries the tech giant is losing ground to rival Microsoft https://t.co/cgWSh3RcNN pic.twitter.com/iNHYo35flv
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 9, 2023
After corporate commitments to scale back on ostensibly “moonshot” initiatives and tens of thousands of job cutbacks in recent weeks, the new ChatGPT software has sparked optimism in technology corporations. Tech CEOs have developed an obsession on AI, bringing it up on earnings calls up to six times more recently than in previous quarters.
The allure of AI-driven search is that it may produce results in plain English as opposed to a list of links, which might speed up and improve surfing. However, what effect that could have on targeted advertising, which forms the basis of search engines like Google, is still unknown.
Inherent biases in chatbot AI systems pose hazards for businesses because they may distort findings, sexualize photographs, or even plagiarize, as users of the service have found out. “For instance, Microsoft published a chatbot on Twitter in 2016 that shortly started producing racist messages before being taken down. Additionally, a CNET news site AI was discovered to write pieces that were either factually wrong or plagiarised,” reported Reuters.
Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Triple D Trading commented on the share plunge meanwhile and said, “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.”
