An error in a presentation this Wednesday in Paris of the new features of Bard, a chatbot based on artificial intelligence unveiled by Google, has raised doubts among investors. After a disappointing presentation, the market understands that the technology giant is behind in the AI race that Microsoft seems to be leading with ChatGPT. Thus, the sale of titles of its parent company Alphabet was unleashed, which has sunk its price by 8% and erased 100,000 million dollars in valuation.
Specifically, when asked "What recent discoveries from NASA's James Webb telescope can I explain to my 9-year-old son?", the chatbot replied that it had been the first to photograph a planet outside the solar system, which it was not. it's true. The mistake was enough to sow doubts. If you have failed once, you can fail many more. “We still need to do large-scale testing,” Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president in charge of the search engine, acknowledged before the bug.
Also ChatGPT returns inaccurate or outdated responses. However, investors are closely watching for any threat to Google's search business, which remains its lifeblood. Analysts fear a worsening of the information but also of the advertising income of all the websites -and those of Google, on which it is highly dependent-, since if users get all the answers in a chat they will not surf the net . "That's why we see this reaction, it's the revenue factory," said Mandeep Singh of Bloomberg Intelligence.
Google acknowledges the skid. In a statement he said that Bard's response "highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process." The performance suggests the company may have felt pressure to show off the technology before it was ready, Singh said. The group says it has not given in to pressure from Microsoft and the worldwide success of ChatGPT to speed up its progress. "We have been working on AI for years," explain those responsible.
