Google's Bard launch ad claims James Webb took the first exoplanet photos; NASA says the VLT did that in 2004

Google's first advertisement for Bard contained a factual error. The GIF, posted to Twitter ahead of the chatbot's Paris launch event, shows Bard answering the prompt "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?" One of its answers credits JWST with taking the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. The first exoplanet images were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

The error was spotted hours before senior executive Prabhakar Raghavan presented Bard in Paris as the future of the company, one day after Microsoft announced plans to put ChatGPT into Bing. At the time of writing the ad had been viewed on Twitter more than 880,000 times. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters