Google, one of the world’s most popular search engines, recently launched a number of AI-powered features, including enhancements to its maps, translation, and image recognition tools, Lens. However, a minor error in an advertisement resulted in a sharp decline in the company’s share price.
Google’s announcement of its AI-based technology, Bard, was aimed at competing with Microsoft, who announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT, a bot that has captured the imagination of web users worldwide with its ability to generate written content in seconds.
Google is in a race to maintain its two-decade dominance in the web search industry as AI chatbots like ChatGPT are increasingly incorporated into search engines. However, the company’s recent Twitter advertising campaign backfired when astronomers quickly pointed out an error. A bot was asked about discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope, and it responded that the European Very Large Telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside our solar system. As a result of this blunder, Google’s share price dropped by seven percent.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Vice President, had stated at an event in Paris that Bard is being tested by “trusted testers” but did not specify a date for the release of the product, which is expected to be within a few weeks. Several analysts have suggested that Google’s hasty announcement was a result of Microsoft’s pressure, but Raghavan denied this allegation and said the development of Bard had been a multi-year process and no single event had changed the company’s plans.
Due to ChatGPT’s success, Google was forced to return its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were tasked with brainstorming ideas and accelerating their response. Despite Alphabet’s recent disappointing results and announcement that 12,000 employees would be laid off, there is an urgent need to respond.
A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence has the potential to reinvent the web search industry as it provides ready-made answers from multiple sources, replacing the traditional Google ads and links that have been its mainstay for the past two decades. In the months to come, it will be interesting to watch the race between Google and Microsoft to dominate this emerging market.
