Google’s Bard ad error costs $100 billion in value

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Google’s Bard ad error costs $100 billion in value

Shares of the parent company lost more than $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its Bard chatbot ad showed inaccurate information and analysts said its AI search event lacked details on how it will answer Microsoft's ChatGPT challenge.

Reuters was first to point out the error in Google's advertisement, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the solar system. The parent company's parent company's shares fell by 8% or $8.59 a share to $99.05 and was one of the most actively traded on U.S. exchanges.

This is a hiccup here and they're severely punishing the stock for it, because everyone is pretty excited to see what Google's going to counter with Microsoft coming out with a pretty decent product, said Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Triple D Trading.

One day after Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate its rival AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, it was a big challenge to Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.

In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompts: What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope JWST can I tell my 9 year old about? Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting that the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope VLT in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

A Google spokeswoman told Reuters: This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something we are kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program. We ll combine external feedback with internal testing to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.