Google loses $100bn

Google has announced a slew of features powered by Artificial Intelligence, but a mistake in an advert caused its share price to tank.

Shares of Alphabet, Google parent’s company nose-dived by nearly eight percent after new artificial intelligence chatbot Bard gave inaccurate information as reported following a Twitter advertisement for the service, which generates answers for user queries and is debuting to a limited group of testers before a wider release, causing the company to instantly lose $100 billion in market value.

The search engine giant is rushing into the space after the bot ChatGPT caught the imagination of web users around the world with its ability to generate essays, speeches and even exam papers in seconds.

Microsoft has announced a multimillion-dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and unveiled new products while Google tried to steal the march a day earlier by announcing its “Bard” alternative.

The bots are quickly being integrated into search engines and Google is battling to preserve its two-decade dominance of the web search industry.

But astronomers on Twitter quickly noticed that Google’s Bard had given out an error in an advert on Twitter touting its new technology.

In the advert, the bot was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It incorrectly offered the response that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside Earth’s solar system when that honor actually belongs to the European Very Large Telescope.

The mess-up sent the share price spiraling down by more than seven percent on Wednesday with investors also underwhelmed by the latest announcements.

Before the problem emerged, Google Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan told an event in Paris that Bard was now being used by “trusted testers” but did not give a timeline for a public release, which is expected within weeks.

NP/ Dominica Nwabufo