Why Google’s search business doesn’t have to be killed by AI chatbots

Google’s parent company Alphabet has lost a hefty US$100 billion (£83 billion) or nearly a tenth of its market value after its new AI chatbot, Bard, botched an answer to a query on an ad promoting its launch.

It claimed that the James Webb space telescope took the first pictures of planets outside the Earth’s solar system when in fact it was the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

At the same time, Microsoft saw its shares rise 3% on announcing that it would be integrating ChatGPT into Bing, Office and Teams. Microsoft is a significant shareholder in OpenAI, maker of this much-heralded AI chatbot.