Google wanted to prove that it could go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in the arms race to create a new AI-powered search engine, but instead an unforced error ended up wiping more than $US100 billion ($144 billion) from parent Alphabet’s market value.

A confused and seemingly rushed presentation overnight in Paris was a bad look for the web giant, at a time when the media, analysts and enthusiastic users were expecting a clap-back to Microsoft’s just-launched new Bing experience based on OpenAI language models.

Google’s initial attempts to show off its rival to the OpenAI-powered new Bing have not been well recieved.Credit:Getty

New information on Bard — Google’s own AI searchbot — was practically non-existent, while presentations on Search, Maps and Translate mostly covered already-announced features. At one point, a presenter had to abandon a demonstration because she couldn’t find the right phone.

But the hugely expensive stuff-up actually came before the presentation, when Google posted a GIF showing how Bard might work, and Reuters fact-checked it.

It was the same kind of example Microsoft has given for the new Bing; a complicated request with multiple parameters, in this case asking for recent news about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that would be suitable for a 9-year-old. Bard obliged with a list of facts, plus some child-friendly explanations, but it falsely conflated the JWST with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, stating the former was the first to take pictures of exoplanets.

This is not a fatal error, and in fact it would be entirely unsurprising to see the same mistake in OpenAI’s much-hyped ChatGPT or Microsoft’s new Bing. But the fact it appeared in a Google-published promotional video adds to the appearance that the company has been caught on the back foot, and the market’s massive reaction is emblematic of how high the stakes are.

Google has long been a leader in AI research, and a pioneer in so-called generative models like the kind that power natural language chatbots, but has been reluctant to integrate them in their products. OpenAI became the name on everyone’s lips when it released ChatGPT, and Microsoft was able to up its stake in that company by billions, lock down the tech for its exclusive search engine use, integrate AI models into its Teams product, and release an early version of the new Bing without Google saying a word. This week was a notably anemic first salvo.

Part of the shock is that tech-watchers are expecting a war. Hasn’t Google been building this stuff for decades? Hasn’t it handily dispatched any challengers to its search engine throne for 20 years? Isn’t this a very real threat to its bread and butter? Surely it’s ready to press a button and show why its models are superior. Instead it kind of embarrassed itself.

None of this is to say that Microsoft is ahead of the game and primed to beat Google to the punch with a usable generative search engine though. Despite its impressive presentation, ChatGPT frequently includes so-called hallucinations, in which irrelevant or factually incorrect data is presented confidently as true. That’s a big problem for both Microsoft and Google’s products, especially given that AI responses are generated on the fly and so can not be fact checked in advance.

Another problem with generative models — including the likes of AI search engines but also the kind that creates pictures from a prompt, which Microsoft is integrating into Bing Images — is the lack of attribution. By pulling information from all around the web and presenting it conversationally, AI products don’t give users and easy way to check sources, and they may also lift from the work of humans without giving proper credit.

We are early on in this race, and the time may come soon that we have working and usable conversational AI search experiments from both tech giants that we can compare. But not this week. All we have right now is an impressive demo from Microsoft that you need to join a waitlist to try, and promises from Google alongside a simple mistake that cost it $144 billion.

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