What is happening in the market after Google chatbot?

Here’s a quick mental exercise. Suppose you’re Google, and somebody releases an app that threatens your entire existence. What would you do? If you answered “develop a similar app and obliterate my competitor”, you’re more or less on par with Google’s sentiment.

After the resounding success of ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot capable of writing essays and poems, Google released Google Bard. This AI chatbot allegedly has similar features to ChatGPT and is still in the testing phase.

Let’s continue with our train of thought. After sharing the news, what would you expect when it comes to your stock value? If you thought it would increase, think again. Google shares dropped a whopping 9%, that is, a loss of more than $100 billion for the search giant.

Google Bard or Google Storyteller?

It’s not that this AI tool isn’t adequate. In fact, many interesting features were confirmed at its official presentation. Some of these include Google Bard offering answers to complex questions and also helping you plan a road trip or decide what car to buy.

The timing for this unveiling was no coincidence, either. The event came one day after Microsoft, a big ChatGPT backer, held a similar event announcing features for ChatGPT’s upcoming integration with the Bing search engine.

What could go so wrong, then? In a sense, Google Bard acted like that charming individual that would say anything just to impress you. When the app was asked who took the very first image of a planet outside our solar system, the Bard replied that it was the James Webb Space Telescope. 

Unfortunately, it got it dead wrong. It wasn’t the JWST who performed this feat, but Chauvie et al in 2004. This glaring mistake was picked by the science community, with several scientists quickly publishing it on social media. One such scientist is Bruce Macintosh, who photographed an exoplanet 14 years before JWST did.

It has many layers

Okay, so the bot made a mistake, but wasn’t the market punishing Google too hard for it? After all, it’s well-known that ChatGPT is also able to merrily blurt complete inaccuracies, acting confident about it, even.

The problem here isn’t just the mistake. It’s the fact that this mistake was highlighted as an example of what Google Bard could accomplish. Before releasing this information, there were likely many people involved at Google. None were competent enough to fact-check what they wanted to show the world.

This is not only embarrassing, but it also casts many doubts about Google’s internal checks on its products and shows an astounding level of amateurism for one of the biggest companies in the world.

This will probably blow over at some point, and Google was quick to provide a statement. The company claimed that the fact these errors exist is why they haven’t released the tool yet, and highlighted the importance of its testing phase.

Google is still going strong with its new Google Bard, and the worst seems to have passed. In fact, at the time of this writing, Google had recovered 1.63% of yesterday’s losses.

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