In the competition for the greatest artificial intelligence technology, Google is looking for ways to remind the public that it remains in the lead.
And the internet behemoth appears to be providing the wrong solution thus far.
In an advertisement intended to showcase its new AI bot, it was seen responding to a question inaccurately.
On Wednesday, Feb. 8, Alphabet's parent company's shares fell more than 7%, reducing the company's market worth by $100 billion (£82 billion), BBC reported.
On Monday, Feb. 6, the Bard bot was released on Twitter. During its promotion, the bot was asked what to say to a nine-year-old about the discoveries from the James Webb Space telescope.
It responded that the telescope was the first to capture images of a planet outside of our solar system, but the European Very Large Telescope actually achieved that feat in 2004. The mistake was quickly noted by astronomers on Twitter.
"Why didn't you fact-check this example before sharing it?" Chris Harrison, a fellow at Newcastle University, replied to the tweet.
The company's presentation to investors about its plans to integrate artificial intelligence into its products left investors unimpressed.
Since the release of new ChatGPT software by Microsoft-backed OpenAI in late 2022, Google has been under criticism. The software immediately went viral for its aptitude for acing business school exams, writing song lyrics, and responding to other inquiries.
This week, Microsoft said that an updated version of its Bing search engine, which has lagged Google for years, would make even more sophisticated use of the ChatGPT technology.
Although investors have supported the development of artificial intelligence, critics have cautioned that releasing the technology too quickly increases the possibility of mistakes or other skewed results, as well as problems with plagiarism.
According to a Google spokesperson, the error highlighted "the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we're kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program".
"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.
In the course of layoffs at several top tech giants last month, Google's parent company Alphabet slashed 12,000 employees or nearly 6% of its global workforce.
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
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