Google on Wednesday announced a number of new features powered by artificial intelligence (AI), but a mistake made by its AI application on Twitter caused its share price to tank.
The search engine giant is rushing into the space after ChatGPT caught the imagination of Web users around the world with its ability to generate essays, speeches and even exam papers within seconds.
Microsoft Corp last month announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and yesterday unveiled new products, while Google tried to steal the spotlight a day earlier by announcing an alternative called Bard.
Photo: Reuters
The AI applications are quickly being integrated into search engines, and Google is battling to preserve its two-decade dominance of the Web search industry.
However, astronomers and other keen observers on Twitter quickly noticed that Google’s Bard had produced an error in a Twitter post touting its new technology.
In the post, Bard was asked what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
It incorrectly said 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 7 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 provide a timeline for a public release, which is expected within weeks.
Analysts have suggested that Google rushed its announcement under pressure from Microsoft, but Raghavan denied the claim.
“This has been a multiyear journey,” he said, adding that no single event had “dramatically changed the course” of Google’s plans.
Google executives on Wednesday announced several AI-induced improvements across products such as maps, translation and its image recognition tool Lens.
Microsoft has said it plans to incorporate AI into its Office suite and Teams messaging app.
However, its promise to soup up its much-maligned Bing search engine put it on a collision course with Google, which has dominated the field for two decades.
Separately, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) on Thursday said it is working on a rival to ChatGPT, joining a flurry of global tech firms rushing to match the popular AI-powered chatbot.
The ChatGPT-style conversation application is being tested by employees, a company spokeswoman said.
She declined to offer details on when the service would be launched or whether it would be part of Taobao (淘寶), China’s largest online shopping platform.
The announcement comes days after Chinese search giant Baidu Inc (百度) said it would complete testing of its AI chatbot next month.
However, Beijing has said that using AI chat technology to create chillingly accurate digital doppelgangers through “deepfakes” presents a “danger to national security and social stability.”
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