Google's Alphabet loses $100 billion in market value after Bard answers incorrectly

Hours before Bard's launch event in Paris, the error was discovered. In the video showing Bard in action, the chatbot delivers an erroneous answer to a promt.

In its promotional video, Google Inc's new experimental AI service, Bard, an answer to Microsoft's ChatGPT, delivered inaccurate information. Shares of the company tumbled 7.8 percent on the Nasdaq exchange in the regular trading hours on February 8, and were largely flat in the after-hour trading.

Reuters caught the error minutes before Bard's Paris launch event. In the video showing Bard in action, the chatbot responds to a question about what to tell a 9-year old about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), saying that the JWST was used to take pictures of a planet outside the Milky Way. This is not true.

Designed to compete with Microsoft's ground-breaking AI chatbot, ChatGPT, the chatbot simplifies complex topics. However, Google seems to have come up with a rival too quickly.

There still is a long way to go for AI systems to perform into business operations and replace jobs. The risks of plagiarism, skewed results and inaccurate solutions remain.