Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

February 9 (Xinhua)-- shares of its parent company Alphabet plunged 8% on Wednesday after Google's new AI chat robot Bard gave the wrong answer to a query, wiping out more than $100 billion in market value. This may further raise questions about the accuracy of search engines and the use of AI to answer human questions.

When demonstrating how Bard works, the user enters a search query: "what new findings of the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell a 9-year-old?" The NASA telescope was put into use in December 2021, and scientists used it to discover several new planets outside the solar system.

Bard gives many answers, one of which is that the James Webb Telescope took the first pictures of extrasolar planets. However, this is not accurate because the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's very large Telescope (VLT) in 2004. The exoplanet, known as 2M1207b, is about five times the size of Jupiter and is about 170 light-years from Earth.

After the error was discovered, Alphabet's shares fell nearly 9% in intraday trading before falling back. Alphabet shares hit a low of $98.03 on Wednesday, down 8.1% from $106.77 the day before. It was the biggest one-day decline in Alphabet's market capitalization since October 2022, when it fell 9 per cent in a day after the company announced a sharp slowdown in revenue, profit and growth.

A Google spokesman said: "this highlights the importance of the rigorous testing process and is part of our plan to launch Trusted Tester this week. We will combine external feedback with internal testing to ensure that Bard responses meet higher standards in terms of quality, safety and true information."

Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A.Davidson, said: "while Google has been the leader in AI innovation for the past few years, they seem to have fallen asleep when they applied the technology to search products. Over the past few weeks, Google has been busy catching up with competitors, which led to the hasty release of its products and gave the wrong answer during the presentation, which was embarrassing. "

Alphabet's fourth-quarter results were disappointing as advertisers cut spending. The search and advertising giant is moving quickly to keep up with OpenAI and other competitors. But King Lip, chief strategist at Baker Avenue Wealth Management (Baker Avenue), which owns both Alphabet and Microsoft, said: "people are starting to question whether Microsoft will now be a strong competitor to Google's main business." However, Lip warns that concerns about Alphabet may be exaggerated. "I think the new Bing is still a far cry from Google's search capabilities," he said. "

However, Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, wrote in a research note to investors: "search improvements will be a boost to long-term advertising revenue, but it will take time to attract users back to Bing, and they will need crowbars to pry open Google advertisers' loyalty. We see these updates as the tip of the iceberg of Microsoft's AI capabilities and have the best opportunity in enterprise use cases."

Analysts at Evercore said there was "little incremental news" about Google's activity, which could be one of the reasons for the fall in the share price. Analysts said they thought it was a "premature and perhaps hasty outlook" for AI, which Google has been working on for years. Even so, analysts say they believe Google's AI technology is "at least as good as its competitors". "years of AI investment and unparalleled scale should help Google defend its market dominance in the long run," they wrote in their research report.

The new ChatGPT software has injected new life into technology companies after tens of thousands of jobs have been cut in recent weeks and technology executives have promised to cut so-called "moon landings". A Reuters survey found that AI has become a new obsession for tech executives, who mentioned AI six times more frequently in recent earnings calls than in previous quarters.

The attraction of AI search is that it can display search results in an easy-to-understand language rather than as a list of links, which may make browsing faster and more efficient. It is not clear what impact this might have on targeted advertising, which is a revenue mainstay for search engines such as Google.

Chatbot AI systems also pose risks to enterprises because their algorithms are inherently biased and may distort results and generate harmful content. For example, Microsoft posted a chat robot on Twitter in 2016 that generated racist content before it was shut down. The AI used by the news website CNET was found to be plagiarizing and counterfeiting.

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