Bard, Google’s AI service, provided a wrong answer to a question during a promotional ad and, as a result, Google’s parent company Alphabet, dropped 11.5% in stock value
After Google’s AI Chatbot Made a Mistake, Its Shares Dropped Over $100 Billion
Fact-checking these days is especially important. Even chatbot’s should know that. But chatbots aren’t human and fact-checking doesn’t always happen. Case in point. A few weeks ago, Google launched an ad to promote its AI chatbot, Bard. Bard is Google’s AI service that will soon be available to the public after it goes through user testing. Bard is also the competitor AI to Microsoft’s ChatGPT. One of the main differences between the two is that Bard is integrated with Google’s search engine and draws its data from the internet. ChatGPT gets its data from sources that are limited to research and information ending in 2021. Google exec’s have promoted Bard to be the future of the company.
Despite the search engine capabilities associated with Bard, the ad launched to introduce Bard was prompted with a question and Bard answered by offering three different bullet point responses. One of those responses was incorrect and users on social media quickly pointed it out, some going as far as suggesting that Google should have fact-checked the error by “Googling it.” Talk about irony.
As a result, over the next three days after the ad aired, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dropped 11.5% of its stock value: roughly losing over $100 billion after the error. On the flipside, Microsoft’s shares rose 3%. Microsoft also announced it was integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.
Both companies continue to compete to see which one will have the more capable chatbot services available to users.
