Google shares surge by $82 billion overnight following AI announcement

Google’s share price has surged by A$82 billion overnight after a single announcement that sent the stock market into overdrive.

Google’s share price has surged by A$82 billion overnight after a single announcement that sent the stock market into overdrive. Picture: Josh Edelson / AFP

The share price for Google’s parent company Alphabet has surged by A$82 billion overnight after a single announcement.

Alphabet unveiled a major update to its artificial intelligence (AI) platform to improve its Google search algorithm on Wednesday local time (Wednesday night/Thursday morning AEDT).

The news sent Alphabet’s stocks into overdrive, with investors rushing to get their hands on the shares, increasing the company’s market value by billions and representing a five per cent leap overall.

Among the new features the tech giant is rolling out is ‘AI Snapshot’, which integrates generative AI results above the search results of Google’s normal search algorithm.

The public’s reaction to Alphabet’s new ideas suite is markedly different to an announcement in February, at Google’s launch event for an AI tool called Bard.

At the time, the robot spat out inaccurate information in a company advertisement, driving shares into meltdown with a nine per cent drop recorded which wiped an eye-watering $140 billion off the firm’s balance sheet.

Google’s shares are going ballistic.

Alphabet announced a number of other updates in the Wednesday press conference, including a general-use large language model called PaLM 2 with more than 100 languages built in for everyday people to use.

On top of that, the big technology player has created an image search function which can flag AI-generated images, a new AI feature on Google Maps and a new foldable phone.

Speaking of the newly announced changes, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company was making a “bold” foray into a new area.

“With generative AI we are taking the next step,” he said.

“With a bold and responsible approach, we are reimagining all our core products, including search.”

Alphabet and Microsoft have been waging a war in the AI and search algorithm space, due to their respective search engines, Google and Bing.

The popular AI program ChatGPT is a Microsoft-backed initiative and Alphabet’s answer was to roll out its own AI tool, Bard.

But Bard briefly reversed Alphabet’s fortunes.

Google has unveiled a new suite of AI and other tools. Picture: Tobias Schwarz / AFP

Google shared a GIF video detailing potential uses for Bard and how it will respond to user queries earlier this year.

The example included in the GIF showed a user asking Bard, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?”

The chatbot responded with a claim that the JWST was “used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system.”

Twitter users quickly pointed out that the response was inaccurate, since the first pictures of so-called “exoplanets” were actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004.

Bard’s error came to light just hours before Google held its debut event for Bard in Paris.

Shares of Google parent Alphabet plunged 7.4 per cent off the back of the news – losing the equivalent of $A140 billion in market value.

Originally published as Google shares surge by $82 billion overnight following AI announcement