Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) fell almost 8% on Wednesday, crashing its valuation by about $100 billion, after a demonstration of its latest artificial intelligence (AI) features failed to impress investors.
Following the recent viral success of AI chatbot ChatGPT, launched by private company OpenAI, tech titans Google and Microsoft have been racing to integrate new AI features into their respective offerings.
On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled new AI-powered updates to its Bing search engine and Edge browser. Microsoft’s updated products utilize technology from OpenAI, in which Microsoft is a multi-billion-dollar investor.
READ: AI stocks soar on ChatGPT’s success
Just days after Google announced it would be releasing its own chatbot Bard AI, the company today unveiled a slew of new AI-powered features for its Search, Maps, and Lens apps during a live-streamed event promoting its AI bot.
An advertisement shared online by Google demonstrating how Bard works, however, showed the chatbot return a factually incorrect response.
When asked: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard offered three bullet points in return, including one that stated that the telescope “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own 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 the first image of an exoplanet was taken in 2004, as confirmed by NASA, almost two decades before the James Webb Space Telescope was even launched in 2021.
Alphabet's shares slid following the event, indicating the market had expected more from Google as its AI rivalry with Microsoft heats up.
Alphabet’s shares had fallen 7.6%, trading at about US$99.85 on Wednesday afternoon.
Contact the author at emily.jarvie@proactiveinvestors.com
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