Google AI Chatbot BARD Offers Inaccurate Information In Company Ad

A mistake in the ad caused Google’s share price to tank.

Paris:

Google announced a slew of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features on Wednesday, but a mistake in an ad caused its share price to tank. The search engine giant is racing into the space after the bot ChatGPT captured the imagination of web users around the world with its ability to generate essays, speeches and even exam papers in seconds.

Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and unveiled new products on Tuesday, while Google tried to steal the show a day earlier by announcing its “Bard” alternative.

The bots are rapidly being integrated into search engines and Google is struggling to maintain its two-decade dominance of the web search industry. But astronomers on Twitter were quick to point out that Google’s Bard gave an error in an ad on Twitter touting its new technology.

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our big language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a starting point for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l

— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023

In the ad, the bot was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. It mistakenly gave the impression that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside Earth’s solar system, when that honor actually belongs to the European Very Large Telescope.

The mess sent the share price down more than seven percent on Wednesday, with investors also underwhelmed by the latest announcements.

Before the problem came to light, Google Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan told an event in Paris that Bard was now being used by “trusted testers” but did not give a timeline for a public release, which would be within weeks expected.

Analysts suggested Google rushed its announcement under pressure from Microsoft, but Mr Raghavan denied the claim. “It’s been a multi-year journey,” he said, adding that no single event has dramatically changed the course of Google’s plans.

On Wednesday, Google executives announced several AI-induced improvements across products, including maps, translation and its image recognition tool Lens.

Microsoft has similarly said it will include AI in its Office suite and Teams messaging app.

But its promise to fix its much-maligned Bing search engine has put it on a collision course with Google, which has dominated the field for two decades.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT hold the promise of providing users with ready-made answers from multiple sources, replacing the familiar list of links and ads that have been Google’s bread and butter for two decades.

Media reports said the overnight success of ChatGPT had been designated a “code red” threat at Google with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – who left a few years ago – brought back to brainstorm ideas and quickly provide a response .

The pressure to act was heightened last week when Google parent Alphabet posted disappointing results and announced it was laying off 12,000 employees.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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