On Feb. 6, Alphabet (GOOGL) said it would be opening up its new conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology to public testing in the coming weeks.
Since rival Microsoft (MSFT) announced it would be using ChatGPT to enhance Bing search results, Google appears to have been scrambling to keep up.
Naming it Bard, Google's answer to Microsoft's bold move, CEO Sundar Pichai explained what the company envisions for the technology.
"Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills," Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said in a blog post.
But in an embarrassing early look at Bard results, an error appeared with the technology right out of the starting gate.
Asked the question, "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about," Bard gave a few answers. But one of them was incorrect.
"JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system," the AI technology wrote, according to The Verge.
"Not to be a, well actually, jerk, and I'm sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take 'the very first image of a planet outside our solar system,'" wrote Grant Tremblay on Twitter, using the user name @astrogrant.
Tremblay added in an additional tweet, "I do love and appreciate that one of the most powerful companies on the planet is using a JWST search to advertise their LLM. Awesome! But ChatGPT etc., while spooky impressive, are often very confidently wrong. Will be interesting to see a future where LLMs self error check."
