Bard blunder: Google AI bot mistake wipes $100bn off company’s market value
An incorrect answer given by Google’s answer to ChatGPT has wiped off $100 billion in company shares.
The internet giant started promoting its AI bot – Bard – on Twitter this week, but the promotional video showed the system answering a question incorrectly.
The bot was asked to tell a young boy about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The answer given wss that the telescope was the first one used to take a picture of a planet outside of earth’s solar system. But Twitter users were quick to flag that this was an incorrect answer: the European Very Large Telescope in 2004 claimed this milestone in 2004, they pointed out.
As a result of the gaffe, the market value of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell by $100bn (£82bn).
Google is now trying to reassure its people that it is still on top of the AI game.
A spokesperson said the mistake highlights “the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester programme.”
Google AI bot will “combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and roundedness in real-world information,” the spokesperson said.
Google launched Bard in response to Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm. The software has been hailed as a huge achievement in the field of AI, but detractors say it will give rise to errors and plagiarism, among others. a
In January, Alphabet shed 12,000 workers, which amounts to around 6% of its global workforce.
