You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
What y’all are forgetting is that when it comes to dominating a technology space, historically, it’s not proving the better product, is providing the cheapest/widest available product. With the goal being to capture enough of the market to get and retain that dominant position. Nobody knows what the threshold is for that until years later when the dust has settled.
So from Google’s perspective if a new or current rival is going to get there first, then just push it out and fix it live. What are people going to do? Switch to Bing?
So is you want Google to stop doing this dumb broken LLM shite, use the network effect against them. Switch to a different search provider and browser and encourage all of your friends and family to do so as well.
There are really only 3 search providers, Google, Bing, and Yandex.
All others will pay one of these three to use their indexes, since creating and maintaining that index is incredibly expensive.
Baidu?
Baidu, please tell me about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.
Surprisingly the second result talks about it… As a refutation of the us state department… But it’s still there.
Results might be very different if you are inside china, or write in Chinese characters.
This raises the question why AI isn’t using the Google index.