Google shares lose $100 billion after company's AI chatbot makes an error during demo

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Google’s much-hyped new ChatGPT rival AI chatbot tool Bard, which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for an inaccurate response it produced in a demo this week. In a demo Google posted on Twitter, a user asked Bard “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard responded with a series of bullet points, including one that read “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.” The issue is that according to NASA, the first image showing an exoplanet (or any planet beyond our solar system) was actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004. As a result of the inaccurate response, Google’s parent company Alphabet fell 7.7% Wednesday which wiped $100 billion off its market value.

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l

— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023