Google Shares Tumble After ‘Bard’ AI Glitch

While every company is rapidly changing its name to XXXX.AI in order to garner some ‘fad’ multiple expansion, Alphabet shares are showing the downside of some of that over-exuberance.

Reuters reports that Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot BARD delivered inaccurate answers.

The tech giant posted a short GIF video of BARD in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a “launchpad for curiosity” that would help simplify complex topics.

Here’s the ad…

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l

— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023

In the advertisement, BARD is given the prompt:

“What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”

BARD responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets.

This is inaccurate.

The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Speaking as someone who imaged an exoplanet 14 years before JWST was launched, it feels like you should find a better example?

— Bruce Macintosh (@bmac_astro) February 8, 2023

GOOGL shares have plunged over 3% in the pre-market after this headline hit…

Fears have been raised about inaccuracies generated by artificial intelligence systems which are not easily spotted by humans.

It seems the AI is more A than I for now…