AI chatboat ‘Bard’ shows inaccurate answer to search query; shares of Google’s parent firm Alphabet fall 8 per cent

ANI

New York, February 9

Shares of Alphabet fell 8 per cent on Wednesday after the Google parent company unveiled new artificial-intelligence-powered features, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The stock was on pace for its worst trading session since October, WSJ said.

A video Google published online introducing its new AI chatbot system, Bard, showed an inaccurate answer to a search query. The video claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took “the very first pictures” of an exoplanet outside the Solar System, WSJ said, adding that The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says on its website that the first images of an exoplanet were taken as early as 2004 by a different telescope.

The moves come a day after Microsoft said it was building the technology behind the chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, heating up the race among the tech behemoths to establish dominance in artificial intelligence.

Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Google parent Alphabet, in a blog post published on Monday, said the new experimental service, called Bard, generates textual responses to questions posed by users, based on information drawn from the web.

In that post, Pichai also shared a glimpse of new search engine features that will use AI to answer user queries, and said it would open up some of its AI programmes to outside developers, WSJ said.

Google’s new products come amid a flurry of announcements by rival Microsoft about its use of AI technologies developed by OpenAI.

Microsoft said last month it is making a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in the San Francisco AI startup. It said it would be opening up its tools for developers to build upon, and integrating them into services such as its Bing search engine—raising the spectre of a new challenge to Google Search’s market power.

Google executives have also suggested they haven’t been slow so much as careful with their tools, drawing an implicit contrast to competitors tools, such as ChatGPT, that can spout made-up information in response to some user queries, WSJ said.