Google loses $100bn as new chatbot provides wrong information

Google on Wednesday introduced a bevy of AI-powered improvements, but a flaw in an advertisement prompted a massive drop in the value of its stock.

Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, plummeted by almost 8% after a Twitter advertisement for the service, which generates answers for user queries and is debuting to a small group of testers before a wider release, revealed that new artificial intelligence chatbot Bard provided inaccurate information, according to Reuters. This caused the company to lose $100 billion in market value immediately.

The world's most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, which can quickly produce essays, presentations, and even exam papers, has prompted the search engine giant to enter the market.

On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed new products and announced a multibillion-dollar relationship with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, while Google attempted to steal the show the day before by revealing its "Bard" substitute.

Google is fighting to maintain its two-decade dominance of the web search sector as the bots are quickly incorporated into search engines.

Astronomers on Twitter, however, immediately discovered that Google's Bard had made a mistake in a tweet promoting its new technology.

The bot in the advertisement was questioned about how to explain scientific discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old.

It falsely said that the telescope was the first to capture images of a planet outside of our solar system, when in fact the European Very Large Telescope has that distinction.

The blunder caused the share price to plunge by more than 7% on Wednesday, and investors were unimpressed by the most recent news.

Prior to the issue, Google Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan said at a Paris event that Bard was now being used by "trusted testers," but he did not provide a timeframe for the release to the general public, which is anticipated to happen in the coming weeks.

Analysts have claimed that Google hurried their disclosure in response to Microsoft's demands, however, Raghavan has refuted this assertion.

“This has been a multiyear journey,” he said, adding that no single event had “dramatically changed the course” of Google’s plans.

On Wednesday, Google officials revealed a number of AI-driven enhancements to their products, including mapping, translation, and the image recognition tool Lens.

Microsoft has also stated that it will integrate AI into its Teams chat app and Office productivity suite.

However, it put Google, which has controlled the market for two decades, on a collision course with its pledge to improve its much-maligned Bing search engine.

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