Google Bard Chatbot Horror: How NASA's James Webb Space Telescope destroyed $100 BILLION

A shocking mistake by Alphabet’s brand new AI chatbot Google Bard has resulted in a loss of $100 billion in stock value and the NASA James Webb Space Telescope was at the heart of this fiasco. Know why.

Know all about the $100 billion fiasco by Google Bard where it made an error around the information of the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA)

The NASA James Webb Space Telescope made some spectacular discoveries last year. However, in a big shock to stock markets and investors, Google's newest tech breakthrough, an AI chatbot named Bard, has been counting even those discoveries that were not made by the Webb telescope. In short, Google Bard glitch had a massive negative impact on Google's stock value. On February 7, Google held an event where it unveiled Google Bard and its new AI capabilities. However, the live demonstration went horribly wrong when the AI chatbot gave out a wrong answer regarding James Webb Telescope. Investor faith in the product was reported to be underwhelming and in the immediate period following the event, Google suffered a massive $100 billion worth of loss in market value, as per reports. Know how it all happened.

Google unveiled its latest AI chatbot in its blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai where he mentioned, “It's a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. That's the journey we've been on with large language models”. It was also revealed in the event that Bard draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. However, that wasn't the case during the live demonstration.

Google Bard messes up question around James Webb Space Telescope

During the event, the chatbot was asked a specific question, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my nine-year-old about?” The response to the query mentioned green pea galaxy and 13-billion years old galaxies, which were correct to the credit of the chatbot. The JWST recently shared pictures of the green pea galaxy which is considered to be chemically primitive and one of its earliest findings were faraway galaxies including one which was found to be 13.5 billion years old.

But it also included a glaring error. The chatbot said that the NASA James Webb Space Telescope took the very first images of exoplanets (planets which are outside of the solar system). Sadly, it isn't true. The first image of an exoplanet was taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT), a ground-based observatory by NASA in 2004. That exoplanet is called 2M1207b which is orbiting a brown dwarf.

While the NASA James Webb Space Telescope has also taken images of exoplanets, they were all in 2022, the year it became functional.