Google’s ChatGPT Prototype Cost the Company $100B in Market Cap

Lavina Daryanani
Source: Engadget

While ChatGPT continues to be the talk of the town, its spinoff Bard, created by Google, has also amassed its own fair share of traction. Both chatbots are still in their nascent stage. Resultantly, trial-test experiments have been going on in full spree of late.

Google’s ChatGPT variant, however, committed a blunder recently by sharing inaccurate details in a promotional video. That ended up costing Google billions. In the GIF ad, Bard was given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope [JWST] can I tell my 9-year-old about?”

Bard gave a host of replies. In one, it asserted that the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system or exoplanets. However, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope [VLT] was the first to click such pictures in 2004.

Commenting on the latest development, Gil Luria, Senior Software Analyst at D.A. Davidson, told Reuters,

“While Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the last several years, they seemed to have fallen asleep on implementing this technology into their search product.”

Luria added,

“Google has been scrambling over the last few weeks to catch up on Search and that caused the announcement yesterday (Tuesday) to be rushed and the embarrassing mess up of posting a wrong answer during their demo.”

Also Read: Is ChatGPT Plagiarism Free?

The $100 billion dent to replicate ChatGPT

A Google spokesperson assured that the team will combine external feedback along with internal testing to bolster the chatbot’s authenticity. The person said,

“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program. 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.”

Right after the inaccurate response was given, the parent company of Google, Alphabet Inc, shed more than $100 billion in market value. Resultantly, people from the community felt that Google is behind Microsoft in the AI race. After losing more than 7.68% in value in a single day, GOOGL closed at $99.37 on Wednesday.

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