Published 9th Feb, 2023

Bard, a chatbot introduced on Monday by Google, has cost the company $100 billion.

Google published an advert showing Bard responding to questions and explaining its functionality to potential users, but one of its answers was incorrect.

In this ad which, as of press time, remains on Google’s official Twitter page, Bard claims the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth’s solar system.

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023

This claim was quickly refuted by astronauts and social media users who pointed out that the European Very Large Telescope was credited for that feat in 2004.

Misinformation at scale; bullshit as a service.

(The European Very Large Telescope- not the JWST – took the first optical photograph of an exoplanet in 2004.) https://t.co/J4mJMPORQe
— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) February 8, 2023

Following the backlash, reports show that shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, sank more than seven percent on Wednesday, knocking $100 billion off the firm’s market value.

A Google spokesperson said the error highlighted “the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester programme”.

“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and roundedness in real-world information,” they said.

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