Google’s ChatGPT rival Bard gives wrong answer in ad, sending shares diving
- A sell-off of Alphabet shares knocked US$100 billion in market value from Google’s parent company on the day of a launch event for the new search bot
- A clip shows Bard wrongly suggesting that the James Webb Space Telescope was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system
Google published an online advertisement in which its much-anticipated AI chatbot Bard delivered an inaccurate answer.
The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a “launch pad for curiosity” that would help simplify complex topics.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”
Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate.
The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004, as confirmed by Nasa.
“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester programme,” a Google spokesperson said.
“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
The error was spotted hours before Google hosted a launch event for Bard in Paris, where senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised that users would use the technology to interact with information in “entirely new ways”.
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Raghavan presented Bard on Wednesday as the future of the company, telling audience members that by using generative AI, “the only limit to search will be your imagination”.
But the presentation apparently failed to dazzle, and a sell-off of Alphabet shares knocked US$100 billion in market value from Google’s parent company on Wednesday, feeding worries the tech giant is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp.
Alphabet shares slid nearly 9 per cent at one point, while Microsoft shares jumped around 3 per cent before paring gains.
“This sell off is ChatGPT driven and the view that Bard is playing major catch-up and could be a dent to Google,” Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said.
Google’s launch event came one day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products.
The appeal of AI-driven search is that it could spit out results in plain language, rather than in a list of links, which could make browsing faster and more efficient. It remains unclear what impact that might have on targeted advertising, the backbone of search engines like Google.
“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,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D A Davidson.
“Google has been scrambling over the last few weeks to catch up on Search and that caused the announcement yesterday to be rushed and the embarrassing mess up of posting a wrong answer during their demo.”
At the time of writing, the ad had been viewed on Twitter more than 1.2 million times.
