Expensive Tweet

With one tweet, Google managed to wipe about $100 billion off its market cap. On Tuesday night, the company tweeted a promotional video of their AI competitor Bard answering a question on interesting facts about the James Webb Space Telescope. Unfortunately, not all the facts given by Bard were accurate. It incorrectly said that JWST was the first to capture an image of a planet outside of our solar system. Hmm, I wonder why someone at Google didn't fact-check such an important announcement.

Google is one of the industry leaders in AI, having spent a ton of money on research over many years. The foundation of ChatGPT actually comes from a white paper that Google published on the topic in 2017. That tweet on Tuesday night made the market question if Google is still an AI leader.

At the same time as this fumble was happening, Microsoft announced that their search engine Bing will be enhanced with an upgraded version of ChatGPT. The market's reaction was to send Google's share price down 7.7%. Google controls 90% of the search market, making a significant amount of money in the process. The question is how much market share will Microsoft take?

It is worth noting that most people use Chrome as a web browser, which automatically directs traffic to Google. Assuming that Google can get back on the horse quickly, the threat from Microsoft is limited, because if Google still works, then there is no need to look elsewhere. One market commentator noted that having some real competition might be good for Google's long-term health.

Given the effort that Google has already put into AI research, you have to back them to fix these problems and remain an industry leader.