Barely a full business week since its debut, Google’s freshly unveiled artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard has already made a massive impact on the world’s third largest tech company. Just not in the way they’d intended.
After the ChatGPT rival served up inaccurate information during a promotional video, fuelling concerns it was falling behind to the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, a major selloff of shares in Google parent company Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) occurred, wiping out approximately US$100 billion (AU$144 billion) of its market value.
This represents Alphabet’s biggest stock price drop in three months.
A Google spokesperson publicly stated: “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program.”
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“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.”
In related news, Microsoft has unveiled a new iteration of the Bing search engine and Edge browser that leverages the tech developed by OpenAI. The corporation helmed by Satya Nadella plans to invest several more billion on this front.
It’s becoming increasingly clear the likes of Google Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT isn’t just where the money lies. This is indeed the future.
At the time of this writing, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) is trading at US$99.37.
