Mistakes are paid, and Alphabet has just found out the hard way. Google’s parent company has lost nearly $100 billion in its market capitalization. The culprit has his own name: Bard, his competitor from ChatGPT.
too many doubts. Bard’s presentation this week has been too ambiguous and timid. Few details were given in her initial blog, and yesterday’s event was disappointing in that her options and her deployment were barely mentioned. Those responsible for Google barely gave details of her conversational chatbot, which will appear in a very limited way in terms of benefits and which will also foreseeably take weeks to be fully used by all users.
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
mistakes are paid. As they point out in Reutersannouncing Bard’s appearance on Twitter they set an example which proved that Bard makes mistakes. In the video, Bard is asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year-old son about?”
In Bard’s response he includes the suggestion that the JWST was used to take the first images of a planet outside the solar system (an exoplanet), but that is not true: NASA indicates how that image was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004. Note here that both Bard and ChatGPT and other alternatives are known to make mistakes, but promoting the service and having one of them appear so patent was certainly a slip.
Google loses ground to Microsoft. Google’s toe-to-toe attitude in that announcement contrasts with a Microsoft that has been much more aggressive and courageous in embracing an evolution of ChatGPT in both Bing and a promising new version of Microsoft Edge. There is still some time left for its massive deployment, but everything indicates that its appearance will occur well in advance of that of Google.
The fall in Google shares is notable in the last few hours. Source: Google Finance.
stock market plummet. That indecision and the error in the tweet seem to have been the trigger for a notable fall in the shares of Alphabet, parent of Google, on the stock market. The company’s shares lost almost 9% of their value in a few hours with a volume that tripled that of the last 50 days. The shares had lost 40% of their value throughout 2022, but had recovered 15% before the fall in recent hours.
Can Microsoft really compete with Google in search? The revolution raised by ChatGPT in areas such as search is enormous, and Microsoft’s fast way of acting makes it some wonder whether the company will be able to turn the new Bing into a true competitor to the Google search engine.
Google is a lot of Google. It is true that getting there first can be important, but it is not always a guarantee of success. Google has extensive background in the field of artificial intelligence and they themselves recognized that even having LaMDA —its great compeditor against ChatGPT— prepared, they preferred not to remove it to avoid reputational damage. And yet, it should be noted that the “T” in ChatGPT stands for “Transformer”, and that concept Google invented it in 2017. Some of this they know, and this giant should not be underestimated.
Much to lose, little to gain. As pointed Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Baurd Equity Research, “Google has a lot more to lose than gain if it rushes to launch generative AI.” For Microsoft, taking risks is not too much of a problem because they barely have a market share in the search segment. Google prefers here to control the impact of an engine launched prematurely, and it only remains to be seen, once things settle, which of the two companies was right and if there is a clear winner between them… or a new protagonist appears in this field.
Image: Alex Doubting
