Google might have impressed the general public and the analysts on Wall Street when they previewed their next big project, Bard AI. Bard was formed in response to Microsoft backed, Chat GPT. Shares of Alphabet rose by more than 5% on the day the company unveiled the project, but following an event that took place on Wednesday, the stock has tanked by more than 11% in the past two days because of a response error made by the chatbot after the Paris event held by the company.
The prompt given to Bard was, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?” Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
This error was first spotted by Grant Tremblay and then reported by Reuters and well, the timing wasn’t really the best because this event was a follow up to Microsoft’s AI event.
Google replied by saying, “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”
Google has been playing catch up with Microsoft in the race of AI and it hasn’t really started well for the tech giant. The public version will be made available after a few weeks and then it can be tested by billions of users worldwide. It will be interesting to see how the rivalry between Bard and Chat GPT, or Google and Microsoft plays out, it is a long road and other tech giants like Apple, Meta are still on the waiting line to enter this race, but one can definitely say that this industry will definitely change the perception on AI and change the world forever!