Google’s parent company Alphabet's shares dropped by more than $100 billion on Wednesday after Google's new AI-powered chatbot provided inaccurate answer in advertisement.
Google's chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator.
In a short GIF video via company’s Twitter feed, Google's chatbot Bard was asked, "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year-old about?" Bard gave 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 taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004, according to NASA.
Reacting to the error, Google spokesperson told Reuters: "This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week…” so that (quote) “Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
Google announced Bard's existence less than two weeks after Microsoft disclosed it's pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images.
Google's announcement follows wide speculation that Microsoft is about to bring the AI chatbot ChatGPT to its search engine Bing, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the firm behind it, OpenAI, the BBC reported.
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which was launched in November 2022, is capable of generating speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles and student essays or human-like text based on the input it is given.
Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models," Pichai said in the blog post.
