TECH NEWS – Alphabet flubbed with its solution against OpenAI’s ChatGPT…

We recently reported that Google announced its artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, and the company started promoting it, but Alphabet, Google’s parent company, didn’t expect the technology to misinform the public. Let’s face it; no one expected that. Neither did investors: Reuters reported that Alphabet had lost $100 billion of its market value thanks to the Bard scandal…

And the sad thing is that in the past, AI did produce questionable answers, but they caused trouble in a different direction. Facebook banned a chatbot in South Korea, and Microsoft’s chatbot Tay has become racist by talking to users. But it’s almost certain that Google’s hands were tied: the massive success of ChatGPT (and another ten billion dollars injected by Microsoft into it) meant that the company had to show its answer, perhaps too soon…

Of course, it’s hard to blame AI when the user gives the wrong data, so in that case, it’s better to point the finger at the user. One thing you can tell a nine-year-old about the James Webb telescope, Bard claims, is that it was the first device to show images of a planet outside our solar system, but that is wrong: it was the Very Large Telescope in 2004. Google tried to dodge the embarrassment by mentioning”the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program.” You can see the flub in the embedded tweet.

“We’ll combine external feedback with our internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information,” a Google spokesperson told Reuters after Alphabet lost about 7% of its market value, $100 billion, following the mistake. Still, it was also 9% for a short period. GG!

Source: PCGamer

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l

— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023