Google Loses $100B In Market Value After Bard AI Blabbers Wrong Thing At Launch
Photo 268850580 © Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com
Baby’s first words caused Google’s parent company Alphabet to fall over 7% on Wednesday, costing it US$100 billion in market value.
On Monday, Google announced ‘Bard’, its ChatGPT rival to go up against Microsoft’s Bing, which also recently integrated a chatbot into its system.
Although it seems like text and art generators have taken over the world overnight, these tools have been in the works for years. That means Google would have had some time to fine-tune its artificial intelligence, and even its marketing collaterals. Alas, when Bard greeted the public, it misspoke right away.
In Google’s promotional video for Bard, the chatbot is seen being asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb space telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year old about?”
The AI claims that JWST was the very first telescope to capture imagery of a planet beyond Earth’s solar system. This is, in fact, false. According to NASA, the first to attain this feat was the European Very Large Telescope in 2004—way before the launch of NASA’s telescope in December 2021.
You can still watch the clip where Bard spews the inaccurate “fact” below.
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
Viewers caught on to the blunder right away, asking why Google couldn’t fact-check this information before using it in the launch video—it is the internet’s encyclopedia, after all.
Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer and the director of California Observatories, commented: “Speaking as someone who imaged an exoplanet 14 years before JWST was launched, it feels like you should find a better example?”
As per E&T Magazine, investors’ faith in Google’s chatbot dwindled following the demo, which led the company’s shares to take a nosedive to the tune of US$100 billion.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, which has incorporated technology by ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI into its search tool, saw its stock climb by 4% on Tuesday. The tech giant proclaims that Bing’s chatbot is more powerful than the popular chatbot, as it’s built on key takeaways from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5. As such, the resulting feature is faster, more precise, and more capable than the industry’s go-to.
It’s worth stressing that such chatbots are more equipped at processing language, leaving them prone to sharing inaccurate details at times. Users are advised to run through generative content for errors and take it with a grain of salt.
Even OpenAI admits on its FAQ page: “ChatGPT will occasionally make up facts or ‘hallucinate’ outputs.”
A Google spokesperson notes that the gaffe underlines “the importance of a rigorous testing process,” which it is currently undertaking. The company says it will combine user feedback with its own testing to develop a version of Bard that “meet[s] a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
[via E&T Magazine and NPR, cover photo 268850580 © Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com]
