The $100 billion live demo fail

Did you see Google’s big announcement?

Bard is Google’s AI tool which will compete with ChatGPT so of course, I wanted to see how it stacks up.

Google did a live demo yesterday and it failed miserably.

In the demo, a user asks Bard: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?”

Bard responds with a series of bullet points, including one that reads: “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”

It turns out the JWST didn’t take the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system (only NASA-nerds would know this!)

The first picture of a planet outside our solar system was taken in 2004 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (I never heard of this before.)

This is one of the pitfalls of using AI to generate your content.

Most people would skim the article and never know the information was inaccurate.

Google’s demo of Bard cost them $100 billion in valuation because the stock plummeted when news broke that it made a mistake.

I’m not a Google shareholder so this doesn’t affect me monetarily, but it does remind me AI is new and should be used carefully.