Google's $100B error turns out to be a global embarrassment

By Shaghil Bilali

Are chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard foolproof? No. They may not have up-to-date results of your queries, they may mix results, or they may be completely unaware of your query results despite sufficient information about them available on the internet (I will prove my point later in the write-up). 

But what will you say when a chatbot as renowned as Google's Bard delivers an incorrect result that costs its parent company Alphabet's shareholders more than $100 billion? That’s what happened on Wednesday morning, when an advertisement designed to show off Bard’s capability showed that the chatbot came up with an astonishingly wrong result, only to be quickly called out by the global audience. 

Photo by Daniel Romero on Unsplash

In a promotional ad running on Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s blog, the chatbot was asked how to explain to a nine-year-old what the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered. Bard responded that the telescope took the ‘very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.’

However, astronomers noticed the glaring mistake and notified Google that the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth's solar system was the European Very Large Telescope in 2004. In 2005, NASA confirmed that the pictures were of an exoplanet. It was a long way back from the James Webb Space Telescope’s launch date of December 25, 2021.

Astronomers pointed out that Google should have cross-checked the result before posting it as an ad. Once Reuters reported Google’s mistake on Wednesday morning, Alphabet's shares saw a fall of 8%, amounting to more than $100 billion. 

Bard was launched on Monday through Twitter. The news came amid Microsoft’s announcement on Wednesday of its AI-powered Bing. While ChatGpt, Bard, and Bing have intensified the AI war, it seems the technology is still far from being completely reliable and capable of replacing human beings. 

Results I got from ChatGPT and Perplexity chatbots. Bard and Bing chatbots are still not open to the public.

ChatGPT

Perplexity

  

I have been working for different media organisations since 2006. You may find many Google links if you search my name. However, I am not based in Sydney, and neither is my ex-employer's company based there. Interestingly, I have never worked for a place called Resulta Exporters.

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