Nearly £100billion was wiped off the market value of Google's parent after its new artificial intelligence search assistant gave a wrong answer in promotional material.
Alphabet's share price dropped 8% after the Google Bard tool's launch got off to a rocky start following its misleading response to a question about a NASA telescope.
It marked the biggest one-day fall in Alphabet's value since October 2022, when the company shed 9% of its value in one day after unveiling a big slowdown in sales, profits and growth.
Bard, its AI search assistant, is used by Google to generate text summaries of search results.
Yet, in an animated image of Google Bard in action distributed by the company to mark the new feature's launch, it gave a wrong answer.
This will raise further questions about the accuracy of search engines and of AI-generated answers to humans' questions,
Bard promotion
In the promotion for Bard, which was released on Twitter on Monday, the bot was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
It offered the response that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth's solar system, when in fact that milestone was claimed by the European Very Large Telescope in 2004 - a mistake quickly noted by astronomers on Twitter.
"Why didn't you factcheck this example before sharing it?" Chris Harrison, a fellow at Newcastle University, replied to the tweet.
A Google spokesman told the Telegraph: "This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we're kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program.
"We'll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information."
Fears have been raised about inaccuracies generated by artificial intelligence systems which are not easily spotted by humans.
Limitations
OpenAI, maker of chatbot rival ChatGPT, has been open about the limitations of the technology and has admitted it can sometimes write plausible-sounding but incorrect, or nonsensical, answers to humans' questions.
The company is owned by Microsoft, whose share price has risen 6% over the past week. Market analysts believe its recent growth is down to the launch of ChatGPT.
FTSE 100
The UK's top share index, the FTSE 100, was up 35 points at 7,920 shortly after opening this morning, following yesterday's 20-point gain.
Brent crude futures were flat at $85.10 a barrel.
Companies reporting today
- Full-year results: British American Tobacco, Unilever
- Fourth-quarter results: AstraZeneca, PepsiCo
- Trading update: Bellway, Compass Group