Google’s debut of a new AI-powered search bot got off to a rocky start after it shared inaccurate information in a promotional video, shaking investor confidence.
Google’s parent company Alphabet lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday, fueling fears of losing ground to rival Microsoft. Alphabet shares, which slid as much as 9% during regular trading, were flat after hours. Microsoft shares rose about 3% before paring the gains. They were also stable in post-trade trading.
Google’s woes began after Reuters flagged an error in its ad for chatbot Bard, which debuted on Monday.
Alphabet posted a short gif video of Bard in action via Twitter, promising it would help simplify complex topics, but instead provided an inaccurate response.
In the ad, Bard is prompted, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard responds with a number of replies, including one suggesting that the JWST was used to take the very first images of a planet outside Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. The first images of exoplanets, however, were taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
As of this writing, the Bard ad has been viewed on Twitter over a million times.
Bard’s mistake was discovered just before a Google presentation that also failed to wow investors.
“This underscores the importance of a rigorous testing process, something we’re launching this week with our trusted testers program,” a Google spokesperson said. “We will combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses achieve a high level of quality, security, and grounding in real-world information.”
By contrast, OpenAI, a startup that Microsoft is backing with around $10 billion, introduced software in November that has wowed consumers and become a fixation in Silicon Valley circles for its surprisingly precise and well-written answers to questions. simple prompts.
Google’s live presentation on Wednesday morning did not include details on how and when it would integrate Bard into its core search function. A day earlier, Microsoft hosted an event where it announced that it had already released a version of its Bing search with ChatGPT features built-in.
Gil Luria, senior software analyst at DA Davidson, said: “Although Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the past few years, they seemed to have fallen asleep on the implementation of this technology in their product. of research.
“Google has been scrambling over the past few weeks to catch up on search and that caused the rush of yesterday’s (Tuesday) announcement and the embarrassing mess of posting a wrong answer during their demo.”
Alphabet is coming off a disappointing fourth quarter as advertisers cut spending.
The search and advertising giant is rapidly moving to keep pace with OpenAI and its rivals, tapping founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to accelerate its efforts.
“People are starting to wonder, is Microsoft going to be a tough competitor to Google’s bread-and-butter business,” said King Lip, chief strategist at Baker Avenue Wealth Management, which owns stock. Alphabet and Microsoft.
Lip warned, however, that concerns about Alphabet might be overblown, saying, “I think Bing is still a long way off Google’s search capabilities.”
New ChatGPT software has sparked excitement at tech companies after tens of thousands of job cuts in recent weeks and executives’ pledges to scale back so-called moon projects. Artificial intelligence has become a fixation for tech executives who have mentioned it up to six times more often in recent earnings calls than in previous quarters, Reuters found.
The appeal of AI-powered search is that it could spit out results in plain language, rather than a list of links, which could make browsing faster and more efficient. It’s still unclear what impact this might have on targeted advertising, the backbone of search engines like Google.
Chatbot AI systems also carry risks for businesses due to inherent biases in their algorithms that can skew results, sexualize images or even plagiarize, as consumers testing the service have discovered. Microsoft, for example, released a Twitter chatbot in 2016 that quickly began generating racist content before being shut down. And an AI used by the CNET news site has been found to produce factually incorrect or plagiarized stories.
