Shares Take a Nosedive After AI Response Blunder

Google has demonstrated its latest artificial intelligence (AI) search advancements at a live event in Paris, but its features were lacking when compared to Microsoft’s announcement of its “new Bing” yesterday.

Google showed how it will utilize AI to summarize information from the web. The demo was conducted by searching the query “what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?” The AI-generated response highlighted some of the key options and how to spot them and it also stated the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. The trouble is this is factually incorrect, the first such photo was taken by the ESO Paranal Observatory, Chile in 2004 – ouch!

Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan stated that “new generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints right in search results. With this, you’ll be able to quickly understand the big picture and then go on to explore different angles.” He referred to these types of responses as a “NORA” reply, standing for “no one right answer.”

The lack of information from Google regarding its AI search is indicative of the challenges the company is currently facing in the search space. Google is a leader in AI and has been slowly incorporating AI features into search for years, however, the markets have reacted badly to Google’s presentation as Alphabet’s shares fell by 7%

Microsoft, on the other hand, has taken advantage of Google’s recent caution and announced new AI-assisted features for Bing and its Edge browser. These features include a general-purpose chatbot similar to ChatGPT, as well as auto-summarizing and text-writing programs. Microsoft have a huge mountain to climb if they want to challenge Google in the search space as Google have a 90% market share.