Google’s Bard Flubs Answer in Marketing Materials ⇥ reuters.com

James Vincent, the Verge:

Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday — but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “new Bing,” which the company has demoed extensively to the press and offered limited public access to.

Martin Coulter and Greg Bensinger, Reuters:

A selloff of Alphabet Inc shares knocked $100 billion in market value from Google’s parent company on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries the tech giant is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp.

Alphabet shares slid nearly 9% at one point, while Microsoft shares jumped around 3% before paring gains. Reuters was first to point out an error in Google’s advertisement for chatbot Bard, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system.

The Reuters headline — “Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad” — seems to correlate the two events which, as far as I can tell, seem to have more to do with a muted response to Google’s presentation and the unknown public debut of Bard. Also, Reuters was only “first to point out an error” if you ignore the earlier replies to Google’s tweet.

Still, it is embarrassing for Google to have shown a product which looks weak in comparison to an offering from, of all companies, Microsoft. This feels a little like an echo of the past, too, as Google has long struggled with its “Snippets” feature.