Google’s Bard fails to enthuse investors, stocks tumble 8% after new ad

Google’s stock fell by nearly 8% after an ad for its Bard AI chatbot offered an incorrect answer

In an ad published on Twitter, Google’s Bard gave an incorrect response prompting a fall in the company’s share price. | Photo Credit: Reuters

Google’s Bard failed to impress investors with stocks of the tech giant falling by nearly 8%, on Wednesday, a report from Investor’s Business Daily shared.

The fall in Google’s stock prices came after Bard, its artificial intelligence chatbot, offered an incorrect answer in an ad published by the company on Twitter.

In the video, meant to demonstrate the “experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, Bard responded to three questions. And while it managed to provide accurate responses to two of them, its final response was inaccurate.

In the video, when Bard is prompted with the question, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?” It quickly responds with two correct answers. However, its final response was inaccurate.

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Bard wrote that the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. This, according to NASA records, is inaccurate as the first pictures of these “exoplanets” were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

Google also touted the new tech at an event in Paris, where it announced plans to roll out AI-powered search results and maps. The new feature is expected to generate lengthy text responses to complex questions similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Other features include video, image searches, and three-dimensional Google Maps with virtual tours.

Google will launch the feature when it is confident in the quality of answers the company shared.

Earlier this week, Microsoft also introduced its AI-powered version of the search engine Bing which uses OpenAI’s technology to answer search queries with comprehensive responses from a chatbot, but on a limited basis.

Bing’s official website announced the new update and also provided some pre-set questions and search requests that users could try out, in order to experience the chatbot.