Google’s new chatbot Bard made a mistake – which cost the company more than 900 million euros

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Google’s new chatbot Bard made a mistake – which cost the company more than 900 million euros

Google wants to compete with ChatGPT with its own chatbot, Bard. However, he made a serious mistake, and of all things in a promotional video.

Everyone is currently talking about the extremely good chatbot ChatGPT: When asked to do so, it writes homework, poems and speeches, answers questions and can conduct entire conversations. While many are still pondering how such technologies will change our world, the tech empire Google has now introduced its own chatbot: Bard.

However, there was a small mistake in the run-up to the big presentation. Because Google shared a small video that should arouse curiosity about the new technology. A user asks him: “What new discoveries of the James Webb telescope can I tell my nine-year-old about?” And Bard replies that the telescope “taken the first ever pictures of a planet outside of Earth’s solar system.” However, that was not correct. The first photo of this kind was taken by the VLT telescope in 2004.

Google’s chatbot Bard made a mistake

“Bard tries to combine the diversity of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our artificial intelligence,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, 50, explaining the objective of the product. Bard should be “an experimental, conversational AI service” that should serve as a “jump jump for our curiosity” and “be able to explain complex topics in a simplified way”. That sounds great, but if the answers are given in such a “simplified” way that they are simply wrong, it doesn’t make a good impression.

The investors probably thought so too: After the faux pas, the share price of the Google parent company Alphabet collapsed by almost eight percent on Wednesday, the small mistake cost the company around 900 million euros. Presumably this won’t cause any lasting damage, provided Bard does a better job in the future and ChatGPT can actually outrank it. If not – then that would indeed have been an expensive experiment.

Sources: “NZZ”, “Trade Newspaper”