Google shares slump 8% as AI chatbot Bard gives inaccurate information

Google's parent company lost over $110 billion in market value on Wednesday, with a decline of 8 per cent in its share on the US exchange after its AI chatbot's advertisement showed inaccurate information. This raised questions on how Bard would compete with Microsoft's ChatGPT challenge, especially after Microsoft's search engine Bing began to use AI capabilities.

Drop in Google shares

Reuters was the first to point out this error in Google's advertisement which went live on Monday. After that, the shares of Alphabet on US exchanges went down by 8 per cent to $99.05, with the trading volumes increasing by three times the 50-day moving average.

Google had lost 40 per cent of its value last year, but it has rallied 15 per cent since the beginning of this year, not including the losses it saw on Wednesday.

In contrast, the shares of Microsoft went up by 3 per cent on Wednesday.

What went wrong with the advertisement?

In the said advertisement, Bard is given the prompt, 'What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year-old about?' and it incorrectly mentions the JWST as the first one to click pictures of exoplanets when, in fact, it was a very large telescope at the European Southern Observatory that took the first capture.

This ad has been seen by close to nine lakh people so far, but there has been no response from Google raising questions if Bard really has an edge over ChatGPT.