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Published 08 Feb, 2023 11:10pm

Google shares dive 8% after AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad

Shares of Google’s parent company lost more than $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its Bard chatbot ad showed inaccurate information and analysts said its AI search event lacked details on how it will answer Microsoft’s ChatGPT challenge.

Reuters was first to point out the error in Google’s advertisement, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system. Shares of the company’s parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O) fell 8% or $8.59 a share to $99.05 and was one of the most actively traded on U.S. exchanges.

The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help simplify complex topics, but it delivered an inaccurate answer that was spotted just hours before the launch event for Bard in Paris.

“This is a hiccup here and they’re severely punishing the stock for it, which is justified because obviously everybody is pretty excited to see what Google’s going to counter with Microsoft coming out with a pretty decent product,” said Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Triple D Trading.

Google’s event came one day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other products in a major challenge to Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.

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, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

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