Google lost painfully on the day of announcing ChatGPT’s rival
On February 8, Google just held an event to introduce the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard, however, it pales in comparison to what Microsoft just demonstrated earlier this week with the Bing search engine.
In perhaps the most interesting demo, Google shows off how future generative AI will summarize content from the web. Google asks a question “What are the most beautiful constellations if you want to see the stars”, AI’s answer gives a few options as well as how to detect the constellation.
According to Google Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, the new generative AI feature will help organize complex information and different perspectives right in search results. As a result, users will quickly grasp the big problem and explore many different angles.
In addition, Google also provides a demo of the Bard chatbot. When asked about the pros and cons of buying an electric car, Bard can list them in detail. The technology behind Bard is LaMDA. The event also covered AI improvements on Maps or Google Lens.
However, the small amount of information that Google provided during the event partly speaks to the company’s current challenges in the field of search. Despite pioneering AI and gradually integrating AI into search over the years, this “big” has not yet launched a worthy competitor to ChatGPT, the AI chatbot of the startup OpenAI. Bard has only been tested with a limited number of users and will roll out more broadly in the coming weeks.
That’s why Google shares fell nearly 8% to $99.4 in the trading session on February 8, meaning the market capitalization “evaporated” more than $ 100 billion. Google stock price shakes violently after Reuters Reportedly, in the Bard ad on Twitter, inaccurate information appeared.
Specifically, the post shows a person asking Bard about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but Bard says the telescope “takes the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system.” In fact, NASA says the image was taken by the Very Large telescope in 2004, about 19 years before Webb appeared.
A Google spokesperson acknowledged the error and said Google will conduct a rigorous testing process this week. It will combine external feedback with internal testing to ensure Bard’s answers meet high standards of quality, safety and factuality.
The risk from Microsoft also worries investors. Software company Microsoft – a major investor in OpenAI – announced that it will integrate AI into Bing and a range of other products. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives predicts Bing will “challenge the web search market and gain market share”.
This year, AI attracted great attention from both the tech world and the general public. The most prominent is ChatGPT, chatbot launched in November 2022. It helped lift OpenAI’s valuation to $29 billion. Microsoft has also benefited, with its stock price up nearly 20% over the past month. According to Ive, “this is just the first step on the AI front.”
However, there are still people who put their trust in Google. Bank of America is optimistic about Google’s AI strategy given the company’s years of thorough preparation in technology. The Google search engine also has a big distribution advantage over Microsoft. However, they continue to warn about safety issues such as inaccurate results, bias, fake news, etc.
(According to Forbes, The Verge)
