The artificial intelligence wars are heating up, with tech companies large and small racing to outdo one another and get their A.I.-powered product to market. But the mistakes by the nascent technology are starting to pile up, and Googles up-and coming A.I.-powered chatbot has already cost the company $100 billion in market value.
OpenAI has a head start in the fight with its ChatGPT chatbot launched in November that uses A.I. to generate human-like text. ChatGPTs wide range of uses, status as the fastest-growing consumer app in history, and its potential to disrupt internet searches has pushed rivals to throw out the slow and cautious strategy that has dominated A.I. research for years.
Microsoft, Google, and Chinese search giant Baidu are all moving fast on their A.I. products. Google is arguably the furthest along among the established companies, premiering its own A.I.-powered chatbot for testers on Monday. Googles chatbot, Bard, is powered by LaMDA, the companys own A.I.-fueled language learning model that is similar to the technology behind ChatGPT.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Googles parent company Alphabet, wrote that technologies like LaMDA will eventually be integrated with Googles search engine.
Bard will be released to the general public in a few weeks, Pichai wrote Monday, and it may be a good idea for Google to spend more time perfecting it before that happens. Pichais blog post featured a promotional video to exhibit Bards capabilities. In it, users asked Bard for help on day-to-day activities, including recipe ideas and how to plan a baby shower, as well as more technical questions like how to explain to a nine-year old what the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered.
But Bard underwhelmed audiences with inaccurate responses, including to the James Webb query. In that case, it responded that the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.
But the very first image of an exoplanet was captured by the Very Large Telescope, a ground-based array in Chile, in 2004 and confirmed as an exoplanet in 2005, according to NASAlong before James Webbs 2021 launch. James Webb, however, is being used to identify and catalog exoplanets.
Reuters was first to report on Bards mistake, and Googles shares took a hit as a result. Google shares fell nearly 8% on Wednesday afternoon in mid-day trading to around $99 a share, down from $108 at market close Tuesday. Its market cap Wednesday was $1.27 trillion, down from $1.35 trillion last week. The error was discovered just before Google hosted an event in Paris to display more of Bards capabilities.
Google did not immediately respond to Fortunes request for comment.
To be sure, Bard is far from the only chatbot to be inaccurate. ChatGPT has succumbed to racial and gender biases in certain scenarios while also providing incorrect or confused information when asked about niche topics.
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