Google Loses $100 Billion in Market Value After AI Chatbot Flubs Facts
Alphabet shares plummet after Google's new Bard chatbot provides a false answer about space discoveries in its debut promotional video. The costly blunder highlights the risks of AI inaccuracies as the company races against Microsoft.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, loses $100 billion in market value after its new artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, provides a factually incorrect answer in its first public demonstration. In a promotional tweet, Bard falsely claims that the James Webb Space Telescope takes the very first pictures of exoplanets, when that milestone actually belongs to the European Southern Observatory's telescope in 2004. Social media users quickly highlight the irony that Google fails to fact-check the claim using its own search engine.
The embarrassing mistake occurs just hours before Google executives present Bard as the future of the company at a launch event in Paris. As a result of the blunder, Alphabet shares drop by 9% during Wednesday trading hours, while shares for rival Microsoft rise by 3%. Microsoft recently announces a massive $10 billion investment into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and plans to integrate the competing AI technology into its Bing search engine.
This situation highlights a major vulnerability with conversational AI technology, as these bots frequently state incorrect information as fact because they are designed to fill in conversational gaps. Ethicists warn that the rapid rollout of such tools increases the risk of spreading misinformation, generating biased answers, and enabling plagiarism. The intense AI rivalry between Google and Microsoft unfolds against a backdrop of widespread job cuts across the tech sector, with Alphabet recently laying off about 6% of its global workforce.