Google’s New ChatGPT Rival Just Biffed It So Hard Google Lost $144 Billion

Swing and a miss.

It seems like the robot uprising might still be a while off.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has lost AUD $144 billion in value after it's new AI chatbot got a simple question wrong.

Google announced "Bard" earlier this week as a rival to the immensely popular ChatGPT.

In an official ad, Google showed the AI chatbot answering the question “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”

Instead of answering the question correctly, it instead decided to make something up and said the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside the solar system.

Bard, clearly not worried about quickly googling something, didn’t realise that those photos were actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope back in 2004.

Alphabet’s stock price quickly dropped by 7.7 per cent, roughly USD $100 billion.

Google were quick to deflect, suggesting the screw-up was actually good for the AI chatbot, as it “importance of a rigorous testing process”.

Ok, sure.

Bard was set to be Google’s answer to ChatGPT, and although ChatGPT has made some mistakes of its own, Google still has some work to do.

Google has said Bard will be released to the public “in the coming weeks”, but if its telescope knowledge ain’t up to scratch, I don’t want it.