$140 billion in losses caused by the wrong answer of the Google chatbot

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GoogleBard's highly publicized new AI chatbot tool, which has yet to be released to the public, gave an inaccurate response to a user this week.

In a demo that Google posted on Twitter, a user asks Bard, “What new James Webb Space Telescope discoveries can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard responds with a number of points, including: “JWST took the first pictures of the planet outside of our solar system.”

However, according to NASA, the first image of the exoplanet — planet outside our solar system — was actually obtained by the Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory almost two decades ago, in 2004.

Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, fell 8%, equivalent to an estimated $140 billion loss, in afternoon trading on Wednesday after Reuters first reported Bard's inaccurate response.

Chatbot bug pushes a challenge for Google as it seeks to integrate the same artificial intelligence technology that underpins Microsoft-backed ChatGPT into its core search engine.

In trying to keep up with what some say may be a radical change driven by conversational AI in how the web searches for information, Google is now risking ruining its search engine's reputation for reliable information.

ChatGPT, Bard is built on a large language model that is trained on the web's vast datasets to generate compelling responses to user queries. Experts have long warned that these tools can spread misinformation.

In an apparent attempt to address this issue, Google has previously stated that Bard will be open to “trusted testers” first; this week, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.

“This highlights the importance of the rigorous testing process we're launching this week with our Trusted Tester program,” — said a Google spokesperson in a statement regarding the actual error.

Google introduced Bard earlier this week as part of an apparent attempt to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT, which has been used to create essays, lyrics, and answer questions that could previously be searched on Google. ChatGPT's meteoric rise in popularity reportedly prompted Google's leadership to announce “red code” for its search product.

On Wednesday, Google held an event at its Paris office where the tech giant detailed plans to use artificial intelligence technology to radically change the way people search for information online.Google Event took place one day after competitor Microsoft announced an updated version of Bing based on a more advanced version of the AI ​​used by ChatGPT.

In the presentation, a Google executive talked about plans to use this technology to offer more complex and extended answers to inquiries.

The executive said that artificial intelligence technology will pave the way for the “next frontier of information products.”

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