What happened
Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but sometimes it isn't very good for a company's stock price. On Monday, some investors must have believed that Alphabet (GOOG -1.96%) (GOOGL -1.97%) was playing this game, and they punished the company's shares for it. Both of Alphabet's listed stocks fell on the day by nearly 2%, a steeper tumble than the 0.6% dip in the S&P 500 index.
So what
In Google's official blog, Alphabet took the wraps off a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) service it's been developing, called Bard. The company said Bard is being opened to "trusted testers," in advance of a wider release to the general public.
If this sounds familiar, there's a good reason. Bard is not unlike the hotly popular ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that can generate information or content from a series of prompts made by a user.
ChatGPT is backed by Alphabet's longtime tech sector rival, Microsoft, which has made a series of equity investments in its developer, OpenAI.
In its blog post, Alphabet described Bard as a platform that: "seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses."
Now what
At the moment, the perception of many investors is that ChatGPT is well ahead of Alphabet's creation. At the beginning of this month, OpenAI launched a ChatGPT subscription service for $20 per month. This allows users to get what's effectively priority access to the platform, in addition to new features and upgrades as they become available.
In other words, ChatGPT is already being commercialized, while Bard remains only in the hands of testers. Speed counts in the tech world, and it can be hard to catch up once a peer puts some distance behind it.
