​Alphabet (Google) has been talking a lot these days about its upcoming chatbot called Bard, and in addition to the good things, there have been negative points: a factual error, a sense of disappointment and a falling stock.

Alphabet’s market capitalization was $1.38 trillion on February 7 and fell to $1.28 trillion on February 8. Minus? 100 million dollars.

On Monday, Google announced the upcoming Bard chatbot, a competitor to ChatGPT, as well as a chatbot that Microsoft is integrating into the Bing search engine. Google talked about Bard every day, showed how, for example, it can be asked in connection with the purchase of an electric car (pros and cons) or for planning a trip.

The promise is that you will no longer have to search for different links, but you will be shown answers that are worth considering.

The problem was that a presentation intended to show how useful Bing would be, omitted the incorrect information that the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to photograph an exoplanet in September 2022. The problem is that JWST photographed the exoplanet last fall. , she was not the first to do this, the first was an observatory called the VLT in 2004.

This is NOT a serious mistake, it is not, as we Romanians would say, the end of the country, but being in the official presentation of the software from which Google expects a lot, it clearly affected. American journalists and bloggers joked, commenting on the factual error, that someone from Google could use the classic Google search engine to verify information before the presentation was made public.

And ChatGPT makes a lot of factual errors, because it takes information from different sources and does not always “match” them correctly. It is for these reasons that these conversational agents should not be used to write news, reports or inquiries. Errors may occur.

Several analysts wrote that Google’s event disappointed them, they expected more, and got the impression that the chatbot will not be something unusual, but it remains to be seen what the results of the tests will be when many people can run them.

During these weeks, the American press wrote, based on sources, that the huge success of ChatGPT forced Google to accelerate the launch of the chatbot, and that the big drawback is that everything was poorly configured, so the product will not be completely finished. and is therefore prepared for the severe tests to which he will be subjected in the test questions.

Google is a big company, it clearly dominates the web search market and cannot be dethroned. Bard, although he started a little “left-handed”, has a good chance to improve in the coming years.

Sources: CNBC, Quartz, The Guardian

Photo source: Dreamstime.com