Bard, developed by Google as a competitor to ChatGPT, got off to a rocky start when its promotional video featured an obvious mistake about JWST and exoplanets. As a result of this error, shares of parent company Alphabet plunged nearly $100 billion in value Wednesday.
In a promotional video released Wednesday, Bard, Google’s new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, was asked to explain the discoveries made by JWST to a nine-year-old boy. Bard said the JWST is the first telescope to take pictures of a planet outside the Solar System. As you can imagine, this is absolutely not true.
As some astronomers have noted, the first image of an exoplanet was actually taken almost two decades ago, long before JWST launched as it entered 2022.
The first exoplanet image taken by the Very Large Telescope in 2004 showed a distant planet orbiting brown dwarf 2M1207 in the constellation Hydra, just 230 light-years away. It seems that Google’s AI bot misjudged recent headlines explaining how JWST captured a self-taken image of an exoplanet.
Chris Harrison, an astronomer at Newcastle University in the UK, asked Google, “why didn’t you check this sample before you shared it?” asked.
It has also turned out to be a mistake with very serious financial consequences. Alphabet’s shares fell 9 percent Wednesday, wiping out nearly $100 billion from the company’s market value, Reuters reported.
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