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Google's Bard chatbot made a factual error during its first demo: The mistake cost the company $100 billion
/>CNN: Google’s much-hyped new AI chatbot tool Bard, which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for an inaccurate response it produced in a demo this week
In the demo, which was posted by Google on Twitter for demonstrate the capabilities of their chatbot Bard, which is currently considered the main competitor to ChatGPT Astronomers and astrophysicists, however, immediately noticed a factual error in the chatbot’s response: the AI wrote that the James Webb telescope took the very first pictures of an exoplanet outside the solar system. In fact, the first image of an exoplanet was taken in 2004 using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) complex.
The mistake cost the company dearly: Shares in parent company Alphabet, which owns Google, plunged more than 7%, hurting the company's market value by $100 billion.
Bard’s blunder highlights the challenge for Google as it races to integrate the same AI technology that underpins Microsoft-backed ChatGPT into its core search engine. In trying to keep pace with what some think could be a radical change spurred by conversational AI in how people search online, Google now risks upending its search engine’s reputation for surfacing reliable information.
Like ChatGPT, Bard is built on a large language model, which is trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts have long warned that these tools have the potential to spread inaccurate information.
In an apparent attempt to address that concern, Google previously said Bard would first be opened up to “trusted testers” this week, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.
“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 told CNN in a statement Wednesday about the factual error. “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.”
Google unveiled Bard earlier this week as part of an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT, which has been used to generate essays, song lyrics and responses to questions that one might previously have searched for on Google. ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity has reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search product.
Is the world not ready for AI chatbots yet?
Many experts believe that AI tools are not yet ready for integration into search engines, and therefore you should not rush into this matter.
Carissa Veliz of the University of Oxford believes that this story shows once again that the transition to using AI-powered chatbots to provide web search results is happening too quickly, meaning that the potential for misinformation to spread is huge.
