Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/LONDON: Alphabet Inc lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its new chatbot, Bard, shared inaccurate information in a promotional video, and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries that the Google parent is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp.
Alphabet shares tumbled as much as 9 per cent during regular trading, with volumes nearly three times the 50-day moving average. They pared losses after hours and were roughly flat. The stock had lost 40 per cent of its value last year but rallied 15 per cent since the beginning of this year, excluding Wednesday’s losses.
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Reuters first pointed out the error in Google’s advertisement for the chatbot Bard, about which satellite first took pictures of the planet outside the Earth’s solar system.
Google has been on the heels after OpenAI, a startup Microsoft is backing with around 10 billion dollars, introduced software in November that wowed consumers and became a fixation in Silicon Valley circles for its surprisingly accurate and well-written answers to simple prompts.
Google’s live-streamed presentation did not include information about how and when it integrate Bard into its core search function. A day earlier, Microsoft held the event touting that it already released to the pepole a version of the Bing search with ChatGPT functions integrated.
Bard’s err was discovered just before Google’s presentationgle, based in Mountain View, California.
