The chatbot Bard failed, making an inexcusable mistake right in Google's ads. Alphabet lost $100bn in market value in the aftermath
Google recently unveiled its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot called Bard, which is set to become a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. And this chatbot has already found itself at the centre of a high-profile scandal.
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The fact is that Bard made a mistake already in the promotional video, which Google showed live on its official blog and on Twitter. To show the chatbot's capabilities, he was asked, "What new discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?" Bard offered three options, one of which was to say that the telescope had taken the first photographs of a planet outside the solar system.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it's a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
- Google (@Google) February 6, 2023
But it turned out to be a lie. Astronomers, scientists and even a NASA paper confirm that the first image of an exoplanet was taken back in 2004.
Since then, shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, have fallen 9% and the market value has dropped by $100 billion.
