The race to outdo one another and release an artificial intelligence-powered product is intensifying as IT companies of all sizes compete. But while the immature technology continues to make blunders, Google’s market value has already been reduced by $100 billion due to their upcoming A.I.-powered chatbot.
OpenAI has an advantage in the conflict with its ChatGPT chatbot, which was released in November and employs artificial intelligence to produce human-like content. Rivals have been forced to abandon the slow and cautious approach that has ruled A.I. research for years due to ChatGPT’s broad range of applications, history-breaking rate of consumer app growth, and ability to hamper internet searches.
A.I. products from Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, the largest search engine in China, are all progressing quickly. Of the established businesses, Google is likely the most advanced, having debuted its very own A.I.-powered chatbot on February 6th for testing. LaMDA, Google’s proprietary A.I.-driven language learning model, which is comparable to ChatGPT’s technology, powers Bard, the company’s chatbot.
What does Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet say?
LaMDA-like technology would ultimately be merged into Google’s search engine, according to Sundar Pichai. Pichai said that Bard will be made available to the whole public in a few weeks, and it might be wise for Google to invest additional time refining it before then. An advertisement for Bard was included in Pichai’s blog post to showcase its abilities. Users asked Bard for assistance with routine tasks as well as more technical questions like how to convey what the James Webb Space Telescope has found to a 9-year-old.
Bard, however, disappointed people by giving false answers, particularly in reply to James Webb’s question. The telescope captured the “very first photographs of a planet outside of our solar system,” it answered in that instance. But, very long before James Webb’s launch in 2021, the Very Large Telescope, a ground-based array in Chile, captured the first picture of an exoplanet and identified it as such in 2005, according to NASA.
Bard’s error was originally reported by Reuters, and as a reaction, Google’s stock declined. Google stocks decreased by almost 8% on February 8th during midday trading, from $108 at the close of trading on February 9th to about $99 per share. Its market cap was $1.27 trillion on August 8th, down from $1.35 trillion the previous week.
According to a Google spokesperson, Bard’s error highlights “the significance of a stringent testing process, something which we’re starting to take off this week with our Trusted Tester program.” The company is also integrating feedback to make sure Bard’s answers meet “a high standard for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information” before it is released to a larger audience.
Moreover, Bard is not the only chatbot that makes mistakes. In some situations, ChatGPT has fallen into racial and gender biases while also giving inaccurate or unclear answers when queried about specialized subjects.