By Jess Jones
Google’s parent company Alphabet’s shares plummeted yesterday after its brand new AI chatbot answered a question wrong during a promotional video.
The owner of Google saw shares crash almost eight per cent on Wednesday, causing a $100bn (£82bn) loss to its value.
This comes after Alphabet announced that Google would be launching an integrating its own version of an AI chatbot, similar to ChatGPT, called Bard.
It followed the release of a clip which showed a user asking Bard “what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine year old about?”.
In its reply, Bard included the statement that the JWST took the first photo of a planet outside Earth’s solar system.
Experts were quick to point out an embarrassing flaw in the bot’s answer, with astrophysicist Grant Tremblay posting on Twitter: “Not to be a ~well, actually~ jerk, and I’m sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take “the very first image of a planet outside our solar system”.
He corrected Bard, saying the first image was in fact captured by “Chauvin et al. (2004) with the VLT/NACO using adaptive optics”.
This error highlights a major concern with AI which is that, while its answers may look true, they are not always factually correct and do not cite their sources.
Google introduced Bard on Monday, although did not specify an exact date when the platform will be publicly available.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai commented on the reveal: “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses”.
The company also recently announced it is investing $300m into Anthropic, an AI startup by former members of OpenAI.
Hours later a live-streamed event took place in Paris where the tech giant was trying to promote its new chatbot named Bard.
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