Investors were largely underwhelmed by the demonstration. In one instance,Bard was asked about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. In one of its responses,Bard said the telescope was used to take the first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system – but NASA says those were actually taken by a different telescope.
Alphabet shares fell by 7.7 per cent on Wall Street. The fall has wiped more than $US100 billion ($144 billion) off Alphabet’s market value.
For now,Bard is available only to a limited number of trusted testers,and OpenAI’s ChatGPT has also been found to deliver inaccurate or outdated responses. Yet investors are keenly attuned to any threat to Google’s search business,which remains its lifeblood.
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“That is why you see such a reaction,because this is the money generator,the cash cow in Alphabet’s portfolio,” said Mandeep Singh,an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.
Google said in a statement that Bard’s response “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process”. The company said it will combine external feedback with its own internal testing to ensure Bard’s responses “meet a high bar for quality,safety and groundedness in real-world information”.
The scrutiny comes as the battle to build the most accurate and effective search engine is escalating.