False facts in promotional clip
Google AI bug causes stock to crash
2/9/2023 12:36 p.m
In the very first commercial, of all things, the Google chatbot Bard makes a blunder: the text robot gives false facts about the James Webb space telescope. This caused the shares of parent company Alphabet to collapse.
A factual error in the first public demonstration of the Google chatbot Bard caused the shares of the parent company Alphabet to crash on Wednesday evening (local time). Google presented the text robot with artificial intelligence on Monday to counter initiatives by the start-up OpenAI and Microsoft. On Wednesday, however, it turned out that Bard was factually wrong in his very first demo.
An animated graphic (GIF) distributed by Google on Monday showed Bard’s response to the question, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old?” The response also included the statement that the telescope had “taken the first-ever pictures of a planet outside our own solar system”. However, some astronomers later pointed out that this is not true. The first photo of an exoplanet was taken in 2004. The image can also be viewed on a NASA website.
The astrophysicist Grant Tremblay wrote on Twitter, he doesn’t want to be an idiot and is also sure that Bard will be impressive. “But for the record, JWST did not take ‘the first-ever image of a planet outside our solar system'”. The researcher referred to a photo taken by the European Southern Observatory ESO in Chile in 2004.
Investors are disappointed
When introducing Bard on Monday, Google itself pointed out that the system can also deliver incorrect answers. Still, investors were disappointed with Bard’s poor start. The group’s shares fell by more than 7 percent on Wednesday shortly before the market closed. The Nasdaq technology index, on the other hand, fell only slightly by 1.8 percent on Wednesday.
The chatbot Bard is part of an extensive AI offensive by Google, with which the search engine giant is primarily reacting to the surprise success of the Californian start-up OpenAI and its text robot ChatGPT. OpenAI is financially closely linked to Google’s competitor Microsoft and announced on Tuesday that it would integrate ChatGPT into its hitherto only moderately successful search engine Bing