Google’s Bard unveil contains a mistake, furthering negative investor sentiment

The Bard announcement Google made earlier this week contains a mistake that is contributing to and furthering the negative sentiment about the company’s AI position.

In the one explicit example of Bard that Google shared on Monday, the AI chatbot is asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?” It returns three answers in list form, with the final generated response noting that:

JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system. These distant worlds are called “exoplanets.” Exo means “from outside.”

Reuters points out this morning that the “first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.” Bard implied otherwise in the only real example of Google’s technology we have today.

In response, Google says this “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg points out that general investor and analyst sentiment following the Bard preview on Monday is “underwhelming.”

Alphabet declined 9% to $98.40 at 11:26 a.m. New York time, on track for the biggest drop since Oct. 26.

This is especially the case following Microsoft’s more public reveal yesterday. The event widely presumed to be Google’s response took place earlier today in Paris but was more focused on adding other AI-backed features to Lens, Maps, and Translate. It did not have much more about Bard.

• Google Lens screen search coming to Assistant on Android
• Google Maps ‘glanceable directions’ coming to iPhone (as Live Activities) and Android lockscreens
• Translate rolling out more context to translations and iOS redesign

Google is currently testing Bard with those outside the company while all employees are being tasked with dogfooding it internally. Public availability is expected in the “coming weeks.” Bard is not intended to be the final consumer version of this technology and is currently described as an “experimental conversational AI service.” The shipping version will presumably live inside Google Search as seen with the “new Bing.”

A similar announcement on the scale of Microsoft’s will presumably occur at Google I/O in May.