Alphabet Inc lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared incorrect information in a promotional video and a failed corporate event, raising concerns that parent company Google is losing to rival Microsoft Corp.
Alphabet shares fell as much as 9% in regular trading on volume almost three times the 50-day moving average. They reduce their losses after hours and are almost flat. The stock lost 40% of its value last year but is up 15% since the start of the year, excluding Wednesday’s losses.
Reuters was the first to point out the error in Google’s ad for the Bard chatbot, launched on Monday, about which satellite first photographed a planet outside Earth’s solar system.
Google has followed in the footsteps of OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed startup around $10 billion, which introduced software in November that wowed consumers and became a hit in Silicon Valley circles for its answers. Well written and surprisingly accurate for simple prompts.
Google’s livestream presentation Wednesday morning did not include details on how and when to integrate Bard into its core search functionality. A day earlier, Microsoft held a promotional event that they had released to the public a version of Bing search with integrated ChatGPT functions.
Bard’s bug was discovered shortly before a Google presentation, based in Mountain View, California.
“While Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the past few years, it seems to have fallen asleep when it comes to implementing this technology into its search product,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at DA Davidson. mine”. “Google has been trying for the past few weeks to catch up on Search and that caused yesterday’s (Tuesday) announcement to be rushed and embarrassing mess of posting a wrong answer in the demo. their.”
Shares of Microsoft were up about 3% on Wednesday and were flat in after-market trading.
Alphabet posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, promising it would help simplify complex topics, but instead it gave an incorrect answer.
In the ad, Bard gets the prompt: “What new discoveries can I tell my 9-year-old from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?” Bard responded with several replies, including one suggesting that JWST was used to take the first pictures of a planet outside Earth’s solar system, aka exoplanets. pure. However, the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
“This underscores the importance of a rigorous vetting process, which we’ll begin this week with our Trusted Testers program,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure Bard’s feedback meets the high standards of quality, safety, and legitimacy of real-world information.”
formidable opponents
Alphabet is about to have a disappointing fourth quarter as advertisers cut spending.
The search and advertising giant is moving quickly to keep up with OpenAI and its rivals, reportedly inviting founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to accelerate its efforts.
“People are starting to question whether Microsoft will become a formidable competitor against the business,” said King Lip, chief strategist at Baker Avenue Wealth Management, which owns shares of Alphabet and Microsoft. Does the business really make a lot of money from Google?
However, Lip warns that concerns about Alphabet may be overblown, saying, “I think Bing is still a long way from Google’s search capabilities.”
The new ChatGPT software has created excitement for tech companies after tens of thousands of jobs were cut in recent weeks and executives pledged to cut back on so-called moonshot projects. Reuters found AI has become a hit for tech executives, who mentioned it six times more often in recent earnings calls than in previous quarters.
The appeal of AI-based search is that it can give results in plain language, rather than in lists of links, which can make browsing faster and more efficient. It’s not yet clear what impact that might have on targeted advertising, the backbone of search engines like Google.
Chatbot AI systems also present risks to corporations due to inherent biases in their algorithms that can falsify results, eroticize images or even plagiarize, like those Service test consumers have discovered. For instance, Microsoft released a chatbot on Twitter in 2016, which quickly began generating racist content before being shut down. And an AI used by news website CNET has been found to create inaccurate stories or plagiarize ideas.
At the time of this writing, Bard’s ad has been viewed on Twitter more than a million times.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was automatically generated from the aggregate feed.)
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