Google lost $100 billion in market value due to its AI chatbot Bard’s error

We recently published a report when Google announced that they also revealed an AI chatbot they have been working on called BARD. This is a reaction to Microsoft announcing that they are integrating ChatGPT inside Bing and its billions of dollar investment in OpenAI. Google was worried that Bing’s search traffic could increase, impacting Google Search as they control more than 90% of the worldwide search traffic right now. Google has a lot of stake with Google Search due to its partnership with Apple to use it as default on all Apple devices. If Google loses traffic on its platform, Apple can renegotiate terms of having the option of shifting to Bing, which would impact their traffic even more.

However, in all the hurry, Google revealed their BARD chatbot to the world at an event in Paris, but they made a big blunder doing this. Or should we say, their AI chatbot BARD made a blunder that cost them billions of dollars. In the minutes after Google unveiled its AI chatbot BARD to the world and showed everyone what it could do, the company lost $100 billion in market value. And no, this wasn’t because the investors thought ChatGPT was better than BARD.

Google’s BARD made a significant error in its answer to a question of which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system. A planet outside the Earth’s solar system, also known as an exoplanet, was first captured by European Southern Oservatory’s Very Large Telescope or VLT and confirmed by NASA. However, Google’s BARD answered that the James Web Telescope of JWT captured the first exoplanet. Reuters first saw this mistake, and since the report, Google has lost billions of dollars.

The company included this answer in an ad from BARD AI but quickly noticed the error and pulled the ad, but it seems like it was all too late because it turned out to be a very costly mistake. Google spokesperson acknowledged the mistake and said that “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program,”