Google suffered a loss of $100 billion because of defects in its new AI chatbot, Bard. The company released its new AI chatbot to rival the popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is owned and developed by a company named, OpenAI. But soon after its release, it was found out that Bard was delivering inaccurate results to its users. The advertisement prepared by Google to market Bard showed it displaying an inaccurate query. Because of this incident, the shares value of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, fell by almost 7%. This scrapped almost $100 billion off of the company's value.
Google posted a promotional video on Monday on its Twitter handle, which was meant to introduce the capabilities and superiority of Bard in comparison to ChatGPT. In this promotional video, Bard was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. Although it is a simple question to answer for any person, Bard showed an inaccurate response to this query. Google’s AI chatbot replied to this query while stating that the James Webb Telescope was the first telescope to capture images of planets from outside of our solar system. This is indeed an incorrect statement as it was the European Very Large Telescope that achieved this feat back in 2004. This mistake was quickly caught by astronomers on Twitter. Chris Harrison, an astronomer from Newcastle University, replied to this tweet, asking Google the reason for not rechecking the query before sharing it on a platform such as Twitter.
It is a massive mistake for a company as big as Google. Google is the leading search engine in the world, which is used by billions of users using the internet. Thus, when Google announced that it will be releasing its own AI chatbot named Bard, it caught the eyes from all over the world. The popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT has received tremendous attention from internet users across the globe. But Google’s implementation of Bard with its search engine meant big things for wanderers on the internet. Despite this, this promotional video has sparked a sense of worry amongst Google’s investors. Moreover, the announcement by Microsoft to include ChatGPT with Microsoft Bing has added more to the worries of Google’s investors.
The popularity of ChatGPT and its accuracy in proving the results desired by users is expected to bring many users towards giving it a second try to Microsoft Bing, which failed to garner the attention of users when it was launched. Satya Nadella said that with the launch of revamped Bing, the race starts now. Thus, Bard was expected to be the ultimate rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the promotional video published by Google has shown otherwise. Because of this mistake by Google, many investors are now worrying about its success on a grander scale. Meanwhile, Google is doing its best to convey to its investors and users that Bard is still better than ChatGPT and is way ahead of its competitors. Only time will tell the accuracy and usefulness of Bard when it will be released to the public in the coming weeks.
