Shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continue to fall after an error in a demonstration of its ChatGPT competitor, Bard.
Alphabet stock lost $100 billion in market cap on Wednesday after the failed demonstration, and shares fell another 4% on Thursday.
Investors appear to be concerned that Google may be finally experiencing some competition in search from Microsoft after the company integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search on Tuesday.
A decision Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said would “challenge the Web search market by grabbing market share,” Forbes reported.
Alphabet quickly countered, unveiling Bard on Monday, but the announcement may have come before it was ready to be revealed to the public.
In a demonstration posted by Google on Twitter, one user asked Bard, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?”
Bard responded with bullet points, with one stating, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
NASA says that the first image showing any planet beyond our solar system was actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Telescope in 2004, CNN Business said.
Following a Reuters report on the inaccurate response, Alphabet shares fell rapidly.
Google addressed the concerns saying Bard would first be available to “trusted testers” this week. The company will make it available to the public in a few weeks, CNN Business reported.
“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 told CNN in a statement.
“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,” per CNN.
While ChatGPT has amassed 100 million users within two months of its launch, prompting Google to declare a ‘Code Red’ situation, it is not without its faults either.
A report from The Guardian said users claim the AI chatbot “needs a huge amount of editing” and also delivers incorrect information.
“I asked about the diet in 11th century England and apparently it consisted of potatoes and other vegetables, but potatoes didn’t exist in Europe until the 16th century,” one user reported, according to The Guardian.
