In one fell swoop, Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) saw US$100bn wiped from its market value after its generative text ChatGPT killer Bard tragically fubbed the answer to a basic question about intergalactic planetary observation.
Bard claimed that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our solar system.
As we all know, the first image of just such an exoplanet, 2M1207b, the hot gas giant orbiting brown dwarf star 2M1207 in the Centaurus constellation a few hundred lightyears away, was actually captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004.
Google shares were seen 8% lower in Thursday’s pre-market trade after the blunder, bringing the search giant’s market value below US$1.3tn.
Alphabet has found itself severely on the backfoot after rival Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:NASDAQ:MSFT) took the lead in the AI arms race with the integration of ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, into its Edge browser.
The Bard of Avon himself was prone to the odd foible in his day too.
In Julius Ceasar, which takes place in Ancient Rome around 45 BC, Shakespeare makes reference to a clock striking on the hour. Mechanical clocks weren’t invented until at least 1,600 years later.