Google’s AI Error Causes $100 Billion Drop in Shares

NPR reported Thursday morning that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, “lost $100 billion in market value” after its AI-powered chatbot Bard made a mistake in a promotional video

“People on social media pointed out quickly that the company could have checked the exoplanet claim by, well, Googling it.”

Google’s AI Error Causes $100 Billion Drop in Shares

It’s a rough start for Google’s conversational bot Bard, which was made to compete with Microsoft’s ChatGPT, which caused much news.

In the infamous ad on Google’s Twitter feed this week, the company called Bard “a launchpad for curiosity” and a search tool that “helps simplify complex topics.”

A GIF that goes with the post asks Bard, “What new things can I tell my 9-year-old about the James Webb Space Telescope?” The chatbot responds with a few bullet points, one of which says that the telescope took the first pictures of “exoplanets,” or planets outside Earth’s solar system.

Bard says that these discoveries can make a child think about all the fantastic things in the universe.

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 exoplanets were not found by the James Webb Telescope. NASA confirms that the first pictures of these unique celestial bodies were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s large telescope in 2004.

People on social media quickly pointed out that the company could have Googled the claim to check if it was true.

The ad was shown just hours before Google’s top executives talked about Bard as the company’s future at a launch event in Paris. Alphabet shares fell as much as 9% during trading hours on Wednesday, but by the end of the day, they were back to where they started.

At the same time, shares of Google’s competitor, Microsoft, went up by 3%. This week, Microsoft said it would add ChatGPT to products such as its Bing search engine. The company put $10 billion into the start-up company OpenAI, which made ChatGPT.

AI technology has recently taken Silicon Valley by storm, led by Microsoft. It has amazed investors and scared writers because it can answer questions in plain, simple language instead of giving a list of links.

Ethicists say that technology makes it more likely that people will give biased answers, plagiarise more, and spread false information. AI bots are often thought of as machines that know everything, but because they’re made to fill in gaps, they often say things that aren’t true.

Many jobs are being cut in the tech industry while AI is being developed quickly. Last month, alphabet cut 12,000 jobs or about 6% of its global workforce.

NPR asked Google for a comment, but they didn’t answer. In a blog post on Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai said that only “trusted testers” will be able to use Bard before the engine is made public in the coming weeks.

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