On Monday, Google debuted its artificial intelligence chatbot named Bard to what the company said was “trusted testers” — but its first public example had a fact error, according to NPR.
In the wake of the revelation, Google’s parent company, Alphabet’s, stock dropped about 9%, the outlet added. In other terms, the company lost $100 billion in its value on the public markets.
“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson told Entrepreneur via email.
“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information,” the company added.
Bard is a chatbot that gives users answers to search queries, rather than what search engines generally do right now, which is to answer questions with links.
In a press release, Google gave an example of Bard answering the question: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?”
One of its bullet-pointed answers was: “Took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
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
As several social media users pointed out, this was not true — it was actually done at The European Southern Observatory in 2004.
ChatGPT and similar technologies can be rife with issues from biases to factual errors, the New York Times noted.
Artificial intelligence has somewhat recently come into its own, giving users the ability to do things like writing code or poems without much effort, per the outlet.
In the fall, OpenAI exploded onto the scene with a publicly available tool, ChatGPT, that could spit out cogent answers to questions and even write college essays.
The tool’s popularity seemed to push the tech giants — Google released Bard and Microsoft launched its new integration with ChatGPT, also announced this week.
Bard is still being tested, though, as the company said in its announcement, and Microsoft’s is in preview mode. Some have predicted that the technology will end search as we know it.
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” said the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, at the press conference on its AI innovations this week.
Gabrielle Bienasz
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