Alphabet (GOOGL) stock tumbled Wednesday after Google’s parent company published a new ad for its Bard artificial intelligence chatbot that offered an incorrect answer. Google stock fell more than 8% in early trading after the ad fluke.X
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Google posted a video on Twitter demonstrating the “experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA,” the company wrote. LaMDA is Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, which applies machine learning to chatbots and allows them to engage in “free-flowing” conversations, the company says.
In the advertisement, Bard is prompted with the question, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?”
Bard quickly rattles off two correct answers. But its final response was inaccurate. Bard wrote that the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. In fact, the first pictures of these “exoplanets” were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, according to NASA records.
Google Chatbot Competition
Google stock fell 8.5% early Wednesday following the post. Meanwhile, Microsoft (MSFT) was up marginally.
Microsoft is a major stakeholder in AI competitor OpenAI, which operates the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral in recent weeks. Further, Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI on Jan. 23. The tech giant declined to reveal a specific amount at the time.
But the company this week unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine, which has lagged behind Google, a dominant player in that market. Microsoft plans to power Bing with the same AI technology used by ChatGPT.
Also, Baidu (BIDU) fell 5% early Wednesday after leaping to 11-month highs on Tuesday when the China-based rival announced plans for its own AI-powered chatbot.
You can follow Harrison Miller for more stock news and updates on Twitter @IBD_Harrison