News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad

Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries that the Google parent is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O).
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Reuters was first to point out an error in Google's advertisement for chatbot Bard, which debuted on Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system.

Google has been on its heels after OpenAI, a startup Microsoft is backing with around $10 billion, introduced software in November that has wowed consumers and become a fixation in Silicon Valley circles for its surprisingly accurate and well-written answers to simple prompts.
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Bard's error was discovered just before the presentation by Google, based in Mountain View, California.
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Alphabet posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, promising it would help simplify complex topics, but it instead delivered an inaccurate answer.
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In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?" Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
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Alphabet is coming off a disappointing fourth quarter as advertisers cut spending.

Google cautions against 'hallucinating' chatbots

The boss of Google's search engine warned against the pitfalls of artificial intelligence in chatbots in a newspaper interview published on Saturday.
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"This kind of artificial intelligence we're talking about right now can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination," Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search, told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

"This then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer," Raghavan said in comments published in German. One of the fundamental tasks, he added, was keeping this to a minimum.
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Alphabet, which is still conducting user testing on Bard, has not yet indicated when the app could go public.