Google shares lose $100B after Bard makes an error during a demo

Anyone that has paid any attention to ChatGPT, or LLMs in general, knows that this is absolutely par for the course. There’s no reliability that you get correct answers with current training methods. They are optimized to create plausible (from a word-statistics perspective), human sounding sentences. They’re also overfit on an incredible amount of data, which is why they are so large—-they memorize web scale data. But we can’t tell the difference between a correctly memorized fact and an incorrectly conjured one. Until someone figures out, and implements, a good way to wire these up to an external fact data store, I don’t see a way around it. But I also don’t think that’s a very hard problem to solve and will likely result in far smaller models. I suspect companies launch these products knowing these deficiencies because right now it’s about market share and UX, and the technical ML problems will be confidently solved. Especially if you already own a search engine.

They need a management shakeup. Pichai is never going to lead that company with breakthroughs. I know it’s not entirely his fault but Google has been a shit show since he took over. Compare that to what Nadella accomplished in Microsoft. It boggles my mind how Nadella is not hailed as the CEO of the past decade (and this is coming from someone with disdain for MS products). Google needs to change right now before they end up as Intel or Yahoo.

> 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.”

> the first image showing an exoplanet...was actually taken nearly two decades ago, in 2004.

Is this the kind of error we might expect ChatGPT to make? Or is this the first indication that "Bard" is an inferior AI to ChatGPT? For that big a hit on stock price, I'd think investors are viewing this as being the latter. Interested in views here.

I don't think the drop is related to Bard making an error. It is due to the rise of chat based search (as shown in Bing demo by Microsoft). In the chat based search, there will be less ads being displayed. Ad revenue forms the bulk of Google revenue.

whenever you see a headline "X event wipes Y value" from a stock, its usually safe to assume that no, that isnt the reason it happened. Single events rarely control stock prices in my exp. There are always external pressures that matter more, but get ignored.

1. They named it Bard

2. They didn't actually release it

3. The one thing they showed contained an error

Surely this is the strong response to OpenAI that investors were waiting for

So I think I know how Bard got it wrong "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system" this is wrong as the first pictures of an exoplanet were taken 2004. However, if you search for its statement you get an official Nasa release.

"NASA’s Webb Confirms Its First Exoplanet

Lee esta historia en español aquí.

Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland."

So there is a confusion about "First pictures ever", and "First for JWST". With some goodwill you could maybe fit both those meanings on Bards statement, but given the context this is probably not what the questioner is after.

Perhaps the markets are spooked by Google's inability to produce a demo without emberassing themselves.

The bbc article on this mentioned that a poorly recieved meeting with investors around AI strategy also happened today which can't have helped

The stock went up before the demo.

It was a bit underwhelming so the price is back were it was before the presentation was announced.