It's been a tough week for Google-parent Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) as the tech company's big unveiling of new artificial intelligence for Search and its ChatGPT competitor failed to wow investors. In the last two days, the company lost nearly $173 billion of its $1.2 trillion market cap.
That losing streak also impacted exchange-traded funds (ETF) with high exposure to Alphabet. Vanguard Communication Services ETF (NYSE: VOX) and Communications Services Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSE: XLC) each lost about 5% over the week. The S&P 500 (NYSE: SPY) and tech heavy Nasdaq (NASDAQ: QQQ) also both posted their worst week in two months as the heavyweight's decline impacted broader market performance.
Sparking the stock's negative streak, Alphabet's new AI chat bot Bard, powered by the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) technology, made a factual error in its first public demo on Wednesday.
In an ad running on Google's Twitter feed, the chatbot claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took the first pictures of "exoplanets," or planets outside of Earth's solar systems. However, the James Webb Telescope did not discover exoplanets. That honor is given to the European Southern Observatory's telescope in 2004, according to NASA.
Social media users responded that the search engine giant could have fact-checked the ad campaign by simply "Googling" it.
Alphabet's entrance into the AI chatbot space comes as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which generates detailed answers to simple prompts, has captured much public attention.
Rival Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has recently invested $10 billion into the AI start-up and announced plans to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. That announcement likely led to Alphabet quickly announcing similar plans to add LaMDA technology to its Search segment earlier this week.
"While Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the last several years, they seemed to have fallen asleep on implementing this technology into their search product," said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson, quoted by Reuters. "Google has been scrambling over the last few weeks to catch up on Search and that cause the announcement ... to be rushed and the embarrassing mess up of posting a wrong answer during their demo."