Shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, plummeted by as much as 9% yesterday when the its ChatGPT rival failed to impress investors after making a fatal error (via Reuters (opens in new tab)).
The company lost an estimated $100 billion in market value on a day when rival company Microsoft’s shares rose by 3%.
The failure to wow onlookers was partly thanks to a promotional video that saw the LaMDA-trained Bard share inaccurate information.
Bard vs ChatGPT
Reuters had noticed the incorrect answer during a presentation by the company that saw a simulation ask Bard: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?”
Among Bard’s answers was that the JWST had taken the “very first pictures” of an exoplanet – a planet from outside our solar system. This is indeed incorrect, as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope is credited with taking the first picture of an exoplanet back in 2004, confirmed by NASA (opens in new tab).
The day before Google’s big presentation, Microsoft held an event to share information about its Bing search tool, which has now had ChatGPT integrated directly into it, leading company shares to rise.
A Google spokesperson said: “this highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program”.
CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in a blog post (opens in new tab) that it would be “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks”, but many are concerned that this may be too little too late, following a multi-billion dollar investment by Microsoft in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.
Gil Luria, a senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson, said: “While Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the last several years, they seemed to have fallen asleep on implementing this technology into their search product.” Luria explained that the “rushed” announcement had led to an “embarrassing mess up”.
Via Reuters
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