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posted by janrinok on Friday February 10 2023, @10:12PM   Printer-friendly

Alphabet stock price drops after Google Bard launch blunder:

About 10 percent of Alphabet's market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft's next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question.

In a promotional video to show off Bard, a web search assistant to compete against Microsoft's ChatGPT-enhanced Bing, the software answered a science question incorrectly, sending Alphabet's share price down amid an overall lackluster launch by the Chocolate Factory.

Microsoft's integration of OpenAI's super-hyped language models into the Bing search engine and Edge web browser has ignited an arms race. Microsoft wants to eat into Google's web search monopoly by offering a better search engine that uses OpenAI's ChatGPT to answer queries in a conversational way with natural language rather than simple lists of links to relevant webpages.

The idea being that the bot is trained on fresh snapshots of the web, and netizens' web search requests are answered automatically by the bot with summaries of info scraped from the internet.

The Chocolate Factory is not about to give up any of its territory without a fight, though it stumbled at the first hurdle with its launch of ChatGPT rival Bard on Wednesday.

In an example query-response offered by Google's spinners, Bard was asked to explain discoveries made by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at a level a nine-year-old would understand. Some of the text generated by the model, however, was wrong.

Bard claimed "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system," yet the first image of just such an exoplanet, 2M1207b, was actually captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004, according to NASA.

[...] Meanwhile, Microsoft on Tuesday teased a preview version of its OpenAI-boosted Bing that people can eventually use, fingers crossed, and announced features coming to its Chromium-based Edge browser. Google plans to integrate Bard into its own search engine, though it's not clear when it'll be generally available yet.


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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2023, @08:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2023, @08:36PM (#1291308)

    Is it just me, or does anyone else fail to see the value in these robo-bullshitters? Hey Bard, give me some long-winded verbiage of a concept that's probably wrong. I got plenty of that at work from above and below.

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