Shares of Google’s parent company alphabet It fell more than 7% on Wednesday after the company held an event touting a new artificial intelligence chatbot called Bard.
Google officially unveiled Bard on Monday, confirming CNBC’s earlier reports and saying the company will begin rolling out the technology in the coming weeks.
At Wednesday’s event streamed live from Paris, Google executives discussed Bard’s capabilities. The presentation showed how Bard can be used to, for example, view the pros and cons of buying an electric car or plan a trip in Northern California.
Bard uses their extensive language model LaMDA (Language Model for Conversational Applications). Google will open up the conversational technology to “trusted testers” before making it more generally available, the company said. blog post Monday.
The event also showcased AI improvements to many other Google products, including Maps and Google Lens, which lets you search for images from your phone’s camera.
Alphabet’s stock fell during the event, suggesting investors want more in light of increased competition from Microsoft.
Google’s event took place just one day later microsoft held its own AI event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft’s event centered around the company’s new AI-powered updates to his Bing search engine and Edge browser. Bing is distant seconds is added to Google in Search to help users get more conversational answers to their questions.
The Microsoft product update is built on technology from ChatGPT makers OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested billions of dollars.
ChatGPT is AI software that generates text based on complex written prompts. The web-based tool has gone viral after his November launch, leaving analysts and Google employees lagging behind in AI, an area Google has been focusing on for years. I began to question whether In response to ChatGPT’s popularity, Google declared an internal “code red” to accelerate the development of Bard and other AI products, and the company’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said: reportedly Years after resigning from day-to-day operations at the company, I got involved again.
Microsoft’s latest AI investment is putting more pressure on Google search, but some analysts say it will take time for Microsoft to make significant gains.
“Search improvements [advertising revenue long term]But it will take time to bring users back to Bing, and we will need a crowbar to wean advertisers away from Google,” Jefferies analyst Brent Thill said in a note Tuesday. writing. AI capabilities with the greatest opportunities for enterprise use cases. ”
UBS analysts said Microsoft has “a mountain to climb” if it wants to catch up to Google.
— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
