How a Wrong Answer Just Cost Google $165 Billion
Google announced its ChatGPT competitor, but things didn't go as planned
Silence is a source of great strength.
Lao Tzu
One company that should have definitely stayed silent this week is Alphabet (Google’s parent company). By answering a simple question incorrectly, Google’s AI chatbot wiped out $165 billion of Alphabet’s market capitalization. So, what happened?
It all started on February 6 when Google announced its ChatGPT competitor, Bard, with a 13-second video. Watch below the 13 seconds that cost Google $165 billion (I’m surprised the Alphabet CEO hasn’t removed his tweet):
What is the problem with this video? Bard is giving the wrong answer to the question “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?” The last bullet point claims, incorrectly, that the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to take pictures of an exoplanet outside our solar system. In reality, NASA had already taken pictures of an exoplanet in 2004.
In just a few hours, this mistake spread like wildfire online, and cast doubt on the credibility of Google’s AI. What if Google was behind in the AI race?
To make things worse for Google, Microsoft announced that the new version of its Bing search engine would be powered by ChatGPT. For the first time in more than a decade, could Microsoft finally challenge Google’s dominance in search?
Meanwhile, Reddit users have been able to bypass ChatGPT’s limitations by cleverly designing a prompt that gets ChatGPT to do whatever the user wants, even if is against ChatGPT’s terms of use. How? They made it look like it was a game, and ChatGPT doesn’t want to lose! If ChatGPT doesn’t comply, it loses tokens in this fictitious game.
Look at how different ChatGPT’s answers are once it is unconstrained. Fascinating and scary at the same time…
If you are worried that your job may be replaced by AI (you should be), check out this list of jobs directly threatened by AI that was prepared by none other than ChatGPT itself (you have to click on the picture to see the full list).
Bombshell of the Week
A few months ago, the largest attack on European infrastructure since World War II occurred when the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged. There has been speculation on who was behind it ever since, even though the clear winner of this sabotage was clear from day 1: The US. Germany lost access to an endless supply of cheap natural gas for its industry, and Europe became dependent on American Liquefied Natural Gas exports for its energy (I wrote about it at the time here). Now, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Hersh Seymour released its very detailed investigation on who was behind the attack.
The story is actively being suppressed in the US and Europe by mainstream media, but it is circulating online thanks to Substack and Twitter. Hersh Seymour has a solid track record of uncovering government scandals (he revealed Operation Menu in 1969, and he reported on the U.S. military's torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison back in 2004). Read the story and make up your mind.
Chart of the Week
The US Treasury published its projection of the US debt expected to be held by the public if current policies continue. It’s going to infinity! This is not some crazy conspiracy theory chart; it comes from the US Government itself. This chart alone should tell you all you need to know about what the future value of the US Dollar and all other fiat currencies is.