How one mistake by Google’s AI chatbot Bard wiped off $100 billion in market cap for Alphabet

Alphabet’s shares tanked more than 9% during regular trading, wiping off $100 billion off of its market cap, after a report emerged pointing to a factual error made by its newly launched AI chatbot Bard.

The error was highlighted in a report by news agency Reuters.

This comes in the backdrop of Google’s rival Microsoft launching an AI-integrated version of its search engine Bing. After Microsoft unveiled the new Bing, Google posted an ad on its Twitter handle promoting Bard.


"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 → http://goo.gle/3HBZQtu," the tweet read.


The company posted a GIF of its new AI Bard in action which showed the chatbot giving a factually inaccurate response to a prompt.

In the GIF, the chatbot is prompted, "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?"

Bard responded with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets.

This is where it went wrong as the first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Alphabet is coming off a disappointing fourth quarter results as advertisers cut online spends. The search and advertising giant is moving quickly to keep pace with OpenAI and rivals, reportedly bringing in founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to accelerate its efforts.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday, announced in a blog post that the company was opening Bard to a group of trusted testers, ahead of making it more widely available to the public in coming weeks.

“Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short). We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard,” read the blog post.

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