Reported Costly
Google's chatbot got an astronomy fact wrong in its own launch advert
The error was in the promotional material, spotted by astronomers before the launch event had finished.
If it is more certain than you are, stop.
JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.
Google promoted Bard in February 2023 with an advert showing it answering a child's question about the James Webb Space Telescope. Bard said the telescope took the first ever picture of a planet outside our solar system.
It did not. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope photographed the exoplanet 2M1207b in 2004, eighteen years earlier. Astronomers pointed this out within hours, before Google's launch event in Paris had finished.
Alphabet's shares closed down 7.7 per cent that day, which CNN, NPR and others reported as roughly $100 billion off the company's market value. It is worth being careful with that number. A single day's share move is not a measurement of what the mistake cost; it is what the market did on a day when the mistake was the news. The figure is famous because it is large and easy to repeat.
The answer was not a hard question wrongly attempted. It was a well-established fact, stated confidently, in material Google had chosen and checked.