LONDON, Feb 8 (Reuters) –
A selloff of Alphabet Inc shares knocked $100 billion in market value from Google’s parent company on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries the tech giant is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp.
Alphabet shares slid nearly 9% at one point, while Microsoft shares jumped around 3% before paring gains. Reuters was first to point out an error in Google’s advertisement for chatbot Bard, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system.
Story continues below
Google has been on its heels after OpenAI, a startup Microsoft is backing with around $10 billion, introduced software in November that has wowed consumers and become a fixation in Silicon Valley circles for its surprisingly accurate and well-written answers to simple prompts.
Google’s live-streamed presentation on Wednesday morning did not include details about how and when it would integrate Bard into its core search function. A day earlier, Microsoft held an event touting that it had already released to the public a version of its Bing search with ChatGPT functions integrated.
Bard’s error was discovered just before the presentation by Google, based in Mountain View, California.
“While Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the last several years, they seemed to have fallen asleep on implementing this technology into their search product,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Google has been scrambling over the last few weeks to catch up on Search and that caused the announcement yesterday to be rushed and the embarrassing mess up of posting a wrong answer during their demo.”
Story continues below
Alphabet posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, promising it would help simplify complex topics, but it instead delivered an inaccurate answer.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “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 the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. But actually, the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
Story continues below
During the event senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan promised that users would use Bard to interact with information in “entirely new ways.” He positioned as the future of the company, telling audience members that by using generative AI, “the only limit to search will be your imagination.”
Alphabet is coming off a disappointing fourth quarter as advertisers pulled back on spending from the highs of the pandemic when more consumers shopped online as a result of lockdowns and travel restrictions.
The search and advertising giant is moving fast to keep pace with OpenAI and rivals, reportedly bringing in founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to accelerate its efforts. Investors apparently remained unconvinced.
Story continues below
“This sell off is ChatGPT driven and the view that Bard is playing major catchup and could be a dent to Google,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities.
The new ChatGPT software has injected excitement into technology firms after tens of thousands of job cuts in recent weeks and executive pledges to spend more thoughtfully and pare back on so-called moonshot projects. AI has become a fixation for tech executives who have mentioned it as much as six times more often on recent earnings calls than in prior quarters, Reuters found.
The appeal of AI-driven search is that it could spit out results in plain language, rather than in a list of links, which could make browsing faster and more efficient. It remains unclear what impact that might have on targeted advertising, the backbone of search engines like Google.
Story continues below
Chatbot AI systems also carry real risks for corporations because of inherent biases in their algorithms that can skew results, sexualize images or even plagiarize, as consumers testing the service have discovered. Microsoft, for instance, released a chatbot on Twitter in 2016 that quickly began generating racist and hateful tropes before being shut down. And an AI used by news site CNET was found to produce factually incorrect or plagiarized stories.
At the time of writing, the Bard ad had been viewed on Twitter more than a million times.
(Reporting by Martin Coulter; additional reporting by Johann Cherian and Eva Mathews; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Elaine Hardcastle and David Gregorio)
