Google's Bard, an answer to Microsoft's ChatGPT, delivered a factual error in a search demo that the company shared widely. That sent Alphabet's market value plummeting this week.
Curated from npr.org · 9 February 2023 →
Google announced Bard on 6 February 2023 with a promotional post showing it answering a question about what a nine-year-old could be told about the James Webb Space Telescope. One of its three bullet points said the telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope did that in 2004. Reuters spotted it two days later, on the morning of Google's AI event in Paris, and Alphabet closed down roughly 8 percent, about 100 billion dollars of market value. The reason it still gets cited is the setting: this was not a user finding an edge case, it was the single example the company chose to put in its own launch material, and nobody checked it.
