Google parent Alphabet lost $100bn in market value on Wednesday, feeding worries that it is losing ground to rival Microsoft. Alphabet shares, which slid as much as 9% during regular trading, were flat after hours. Microsoft shares rose about 3% before paring gains. They were also flat in post-market trading.
Google’s woes began after Reuters reported an error in its advertisement for chatbot Bard, which debuted on Monday.
Alphabet posted a short gif video of Bard in action via Twitter, promising it would help simplify complex topics, but it instead delivered an inaccurate answer.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
can I tell my 9-year old about?” Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by Nasa.
