The Google AI chat bot Bard which the search giant pitched as a response to ChatGPT which is all the rage these days has run into issues even before it went on to see a wider rollout. In a demo run of Bard which Google posted on Twitter, a user posed the query: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?”
Bard came up with a prompt response, as expected, which it presented as a series of bullet points. However, it erred on one point where it said “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t true as the credit for clicking the first pictures of any planet outside our solar system, something that is referred to as the exoplanet goes to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. As NASA pointed out, the said picture was taken in 2004.
That error, however, proved very costly for Google with shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet coming down by 7.7 percent. That’s equivalent to the company losing $100 billion in its market value. All of this should be enough to highlight the importance of AI and how companies can benefit or lose depending on how they put to use the latest AI technologies in the way the companies function.
For Google, the immediate challenge for it will be to take its online search experience to the next level, something that would put it in good stead vis-a-vis Bing search. This assumes critical importance given that Microsoft has already integrated technology similar to that of ChatGPT a core feature of Bing search. As it is, ChatGPT has already been making waves, and the conversational AI feature is likely to emerge as the norm of the future.
As such, it now remains to be seen if Bing Search prospers post integration of ChatGPT AI technology and whether Google is able to fine-tune Bard to stand up to the new realities currently being played out.
