Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks during the Google I/O keynote session at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California on May 7, 2019.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
Shares of Google’s parent Alphabet tumbled more than 8% Wednesday after the company held an event that promoted its new artificial intelligence chatbot called Bard, one day after competitor Microsoft held its own event to show off new AI technologies in its competing search engine, Bing.
Google officially announced Bard Monday, confirming CNBC’s prior reporting, and the company said it will begin rolling out the technology in the coming weeks.
During the event Wednesday, which was live-streamed from Paris, Google executives discussed some of Bard’s capabilities. The presentation showed how Bard can be used to display the pros and cons of buying an electric car, for example, or to plan a trip in Northern California.
Bard is powered by the company’s large language model LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google will open up the conversation technology to “trusted testers” ahead of making it more widely available to the public, the company said in a blog post Monday.
The event also showed AI improvements to a number of other Google products, including Maps and Google Lens, which lets people search for images from their phone’s camera.
Shares of Alphabet slid during the event, suggesting that investors were hoping for more in light of growing competition from Microsoft.
Google’s event took place just one day after Microsoft hosted its own AI event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft’s event centered around new AI-powered updates to the company’s Bing search engine and Edge browser. Bing, which is a distant second to Google in search, will now allow users get more conversational responses to questions.
The Microsoft product updates were built on technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested billions.
ChatGPT is AI software that generates…
Read the full article here
