Google lost $100 billion shares due to its new chatbot fail

Shares of Google's parent company, Alphabet, fell to $100.00, reducing the company's market value by $100 billion. The drop occurred after the Google AI Bard chatbot gave inaccurate information in a promotional video.

In general, Alphabet shares lost 40% of their value over the past year, but have increased by 15% since the beginning of this year (excluding current losses).

On Monday, the company unveiled its new Bard chatbot, capable of answering users' questions accurately and interestingly. However, in the promo-video, the bot gave an inaccurate answer to the question – which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Solar System.

The advertisement asks: «What new discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old child about?» The Bard chatbot gave several answers, including one suggesting that JWST was used to get the very first images of a planet outside the Solar System. However, this information is incorrect, since the first images of exoplanets were taken by the VLT telescope of the European Southern Observatory in 2004, which was confirmed by NASA. 

As a result, users were disappointed with the new product, which caused concern that Google was losing ground to its main competitor Microsoft. By the way, earlier Microsoft presented its similar product – the OpenAI chatbot, in which the company invested about $10 billion.