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There’s no denying that Artificial Intelligence, or AI, will one day take over the world… or at least that’s what haunts us in our dreams. Have you seen I, Robot, folks? But for now, we can rest easy knowing that AI probably isn’t where it needs to be functionally for world domination.
How do we know?
Well, overnight, Google lost a measly US$144 Billion thanks to a muck-up on behalf of its new AI, Bard. The incident comes only a week since Google launched Bard, its first artificial intelligence chatbot by parent company Alphabet. The incident, which saw Bard provide an inaccurate answer at its first launch event, saw a major selloff of shares in Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL), wiping approximately US$100 billion (AU$144 billion) off its market value.
Google's Bard AI chatbot had a wrong answer on a marketing image and Google lost $100 billion in market value today as a result. The market is worried Google is behind Microsoft after a lackluster AI event today. The AI search war is truly on pic.twitter.com/XIMB1TeKrT
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) February 9, 2023
The incident comes after Chatbot Bard was asked “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?” The Chatbot incorrectly answered, saying that the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, when in fact, NASA confirmed it the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004.
“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our trusted tester program,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
The blunder feeds the worries of investors, with some pundits saying Google is losing ground to its rival in the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI and its game-changing ChatGPT, especially at a time when tech companies are racing to establish the best AI technology. OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, injected $10billion into ChatGPT when it was introduced to the market in November 2022, wowing consumers in the process for its incredibly accurate and composed answers to simple questions. ChatGPT is so accurate, for example, schools are now worried that students will utilise its services for tasks like writing essays, which the AI can complete in mere seconds.
In other ChatBot news, China’s Baidu will be unveiling its own updated “Ernie Bot” in March, joining the global AI race. Ernie, which stands for “enhanced representation through knowledge integration,” is a large AI-powered language model first introduced in 2019.
While AI tech is still relatively new ad constantly developing – as it stands, AI is only in the form of text and restricted to content from the internet – there’s still a long way to go until consumers can accurately rely on its information. Because as we know, AI relies on the information presented on the internet, and, of course, misinformation is widespread across the internet.
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