As the battle of the AI kicks off, Google’s Bard has made a costly mistake in its first foray, making a factual error, which resulted in shares tanking more than 7%, taking US$100 billion from the company’s market value.
Dubbed the ‘ChatGPT killer’, Bard made the error in its first advertisement ever, via a GIF tweet and a blog post authored by CEO Sundar Pichai himself.
The bot was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Subsequently, Bard responded that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, when in fact that milestone was achieved by the European Very Large Telescope in 2004 - a mistake that was immediately spotted by astronomers on Twitter.
The news comes a day after Microsoft launched its ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, the only rival that Bard currently has.
Oops! Investors not happy that the Google AI bot Bard made a mistake. $GOOGL down 8% today. @cathythorbecke has the story. I'll be talking about it with @IsaCNN on @cnni @questcnn around 3:43 ET. https://t.co/2zyozi1FpJ
— Paul R. La Monica (@LaMonicaBuzz) February 8, 2023
Still under testing
To Google’s defence, Bard is still undergoing testing and will be made widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
Responding to the blunder, a Google spokesperson told Reuters: “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program.”
“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.”
Bard’s unveiling comes weeks after Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI in a multiyear deal that will see the software giant become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider.