Alphabet’s first promotional event for its new artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard showed some impressive features—but not enough to impress investors.
Key Details
- Google announced Bard—its rival chatbot to Microsoft and OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Monday.
- The chatbot is currently only available to testers working with Google, and the official launch date for the public has yet to be revealed. A full public release is expected within the next couple of weeks.
- On Wednesday, Alphabet hosted a live promotional event in Paris, France, to reveal details about their upcoming AI offerings.
- The company’s stocks dropped more than 8% afterward, reflecting mild disappointment from investors who were hoping for more.
- The event revealed more about its plans for AI technology, including features such as being able to ask questions with images, answer complex search queries with complex responses, reverse-search for real-life locations using geographic landmarks, and generate three-dimensional images of destinations in Google Maps.
Why It’s Important
The continuous rollout of ChatGPT and Bard’s feature and subscription models marks the very beginning of what AI specialists are calling the “AI arm’s race.” Tech firms are rushing to produce the most advanced and powerful AIs possible to stay at the cutting edge of the market.
As we previously reported, the move to launch Bard came weeks after Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI that would allow it to integrate the revolutionary artificial intelligence chatbot into its Bing search engine, officially launching on Tuesday.
Google has rushed to catch up with Microsoft and OpenAI, fearful that it would lose its competitive advantage as the most popular search engine. The company went as far as to bring in company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to oversee the process.
Notable Quote
“We’re moving beyond the traditional notion of search to help you make sense of information in new ways. New generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints right in Search,” says Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan.
