AI chatbot Bard answers question wrong and costs Google £100billion

09 February 2023 , 11:00

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AI chatbot Bard answers question wrong and costs Google £100billion

A blunder by chatbot Bard has cost Google a staggering £100billion after it got an answer wrong.

The AI machine answered a question about the James Webb space telescope wrong in a promo video after CEO Sundar Pichai brought it in to answer questions more intelligently.

The company posted a GIF on Twitter demonstrating Bard, but followers were quick to spot the error.

In the clip which has been viewed more than one million times, the bot can be seen responding when given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year old about?"

But the state-of-the-art technology was shown to fluff it when replying with several answers, including that the telescope took the very first photograph of another planet outside the solar system.

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The chatbot gets the answer wrong

The first picture, in fact, was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, according to NASA.

The blunder prompted Google's market value to tumble by £100,000,000,000 after share prices in parent company Alphabet Inc fell by 9%.

At its lowest price on Wednesday, shares stood at £81.16, a fall of 8.1% on Tuesday’s price £88.35.

The mistake was spotted just before a presentation at Google headquarters at Mountain View in California.

The blunder cost the company a staggering £100bn after share prices fell (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock)

Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson, said that "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".

He added: "Google has been scrambling over the last few weeks to catch up on Search and that caused the announcement Tuesday to be rushed and the embarrassing mess up of posting a wrong answer during their demo."

Investors were also reportedly left underwhelmed by a presentation on the feature, which tech experts said did not appear as refined or polished as competitor Microsoft's already popular chatbot, ChatGPT, which it plans to incorporate into the Bing search engine.

Susie Beever