The wars of artificial intelligence are heat, with tech companies big and small battling to outdo themselves and bring their AI-powered product to market. But the mistakes of the nascent technology are starting to pile up, and Google’s upcoming AI-powered chatbot has already cost the company $100 billion in market value.
OpenAI has a head start in the fight with its ChatGPT chatbot spear in November that uses AI to generate human-like text. ChatGPT’s wide range of uses, its status as fastest growing consumer app in history, and its potential disrupt internet searches pushed his rivals to throw the slow and careful strategy which has dominated AI research for years.
MicrosoftGoogle and Chinese search giant Baidu are all go fast on their AI products. Google is arguably the most advanced among established companies, launches its own AI-powered chatbot for testers on Monday. Google’s chatbot, Bard, is powered by LaMDA, the company’s own AI-powered language learning model, similar to the technology behind ChatGPT.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, wrote that technologies like LaMDA will eventually be integrated into Google’s search engine.
Bard will be released in a few weeks, Pichai writing Monday, and it might be a good idea for Google to spend more time perfecting it before that happens. Pichai’s blog post featured a promo video to showcase Bard’s abilities. In it, users asked Bard for help with 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 a. discovered.
But Bard disappointed the public with inaccurate answers, including to James Webb’s query. In this case, he replied that the telescope had taken the “first-ever images of a planet outside our own solar system”.
But the very first picture 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 NASA, well before James Webb’s launch in 2021. James Webb, however, is used For identify and catalog exoplanets.
Reuters was first to report on Bard’s mistake, and Google’s stock took a hit. Shares of Google fell nearly 8% midday Wednesday afternoon to around $99 a share from $108 at market close on Tuesday. Its market cap on Wednesday was $1.27 trillion, down from $1.35 trillion last week. The error was discovered just before Google hosted a event to Paris to show off more of Bard’s abilities.
Bard’s error underscores “the importance of a rigorous testing process, something we’re launching this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson told Fortune, adding that the company is incorporating feedback to ensure that Bard’s responses hit “the high bar”. for quality, security and grounding in real-world information” before its wider public release.
Admittedly, Bard is far from the only chatbot to be inaccurate. ChatGPT succumbed to racial and gender bias in certain scenarios while offering incorrect or confusing information when asked about niche topics.
Update, February 8, 2023: This article has been updated with a comment from Google.
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