Google had a bitter pill to drink as part of the launch of Bard, the chatbot it develops and with which it intends to compete with the popular ChatGPT from the OpenIA company.
A day before the official presentation of its artificial intelligence (AI) tool in Paris this Wednesday, the technology giant wanted to offer a small sample of its capabilities, but it ended up revealing that Bard throws inaccurate information and still needs to be polished.
In a tweet posted Tuesday, Google announced its new software as a “launching pad for curiosity” aimed at “simplifying complex issues.” To demonstrate this, he included a short GIF-like clip where Bard was asked the following question: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old son?”
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
Among the answers it offered, the chatbot claimed that the JWST had been used to take the first images of an exoplanet. A false data, since it was the Very Large Telescope (VLT) that did it in 2004, explained the Reuters agency, which is attributed to having been the first to point out the error.
A Google spokesperson in dialogue with the media commented that Bard is undergoing a rigorous testing process this week to ensure that its responses “achieve a high level of quality, security and robustness in real-world information.” “We will combine external feedback with our own internal testing,” he stressed.
The blunder caused not only some analysts to doubt the language model’s abilities to respond to ChatGPT’s challenges, but also a loss of confidence from the stock market towards Google.
This Wednesday, the shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, fell about 8%, which translates into losses of more than 100,000 million dollars in market value.
