(BFM Bourse) – Bard, the Mountain View group’s conversational robot, did not convince investors. Alphabet shares fell 7.7% on Wednesday night at the close of Wall Street.
It’s an expensive presentation, at least in terms of market capitalization. Alphabet stock, Google’s parent company, fell 7.7% Wednesday night at the close of Wall Street, wiping out about $115 billion. This Thursday, the title barely recovers 0.35% in pre-opening trade.
This decline followed the presentation of Bard, the conversational robot launched by the Mountain View group to try to respond to the success of ChatGPT, in which Microsoft has bet billions of dollars.
In a video promoting this artificial intelligence tool and how it works, Google assures that Bard can be used to prepare a meal from the ingredients available in the fridge or compare two Oscar-winning films. Above all, the group gives an example of a request: to explain to a nine-year-old child the great scientific discoveries that have been made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope.
But among the answers given, Bard says that this telescope was the first to take a picture of an exoplanet, that is, a planet outside the solar system. Problem: this last answer is wrong, the first image of an exoplanet having been taken in April 2004 by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile by a team from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
A threatened hegemony
An oddity which therefore somewhat embarrassed Alphabet. For Deutsche Bank, the stock market plunge that followed this odd “shows the high stakes and the competitive pressures of new technologies”.
In fact, artificial intelligences are not free of errors and ChatGPT commits itself by answering the questions sent by the many Internet users who have tested the conversational robot.
But, beyond this blunder strictly speaking, it is quite possible that the market remained unsatisfied at the level of the presentation of Bard. Because Google has not really given very concrete details on how this online search tool could be integrated into its search engine or a deadline.
However, investors are worried that Google will be left behind by the technological advance of ChatGPT and fear that this chatbot will weaken its dominant position in online research. Microsoft announced on Tuesday the deployment of a more powerful version of ChatGPT to integrate it into its Bing search engine, thereby creating a major threat to Google’s hegemony.
“That’s why you see such a reaction, because it’s the money generator, the cash cow of Alphabet’s portfolio,” Mandeep Singh, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, was quoted by the US news agency as saying. .
Julien Marion – ©2023 BFM Bourse
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