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CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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."

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Wow, in the 2000's and 2010's google my impression was that this is an amazing company where brilliant people work to solve big problems to make the world a better place. In the last 10 years, all I was hoping for was that they would just stop making their products (search, YouTube) worse.

Now they just blindly riding the AI hype train, because "everyone else is doing AI".

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I'm agreeing with most of what you said, but Google has been working on AI for a long time. Google's purchased DeepMind in 2014 and kept it as a separate subsidiary, and started their own AI division inside Google itself in 2017.

They also developed a machine learning processor called the TPU, which has been used in their data centers since 2015.

So to Google, AI really means All In. Which is particularly concerning since they don't even have the best performing AI after a decade of research with a bottomless pit of money.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

That are some good points, i didnt really hear about deepmind for a long time and forgot about it. But replacing google websearch with "AI" really sounds like a decision made by marketing department, where they dont understand their own product, their customers or the techs limitations.

Unless of course they want to remove/hide all outgoing links from google search, so the user will spend more time there and google has more opportunities to show them ads from their own ad network, instead of losing the visitors to another website...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Just focusing on one product for this discussion: search

One of the big problems, is because search chooses winners, it's naturally a competition. Which means even if Google wanted to stay good, the ecosystem would change and adapt to them. They're always on a treadmill.

Google was magical, before everyone was competing on the metrics Google used. Once they gamified it, The ecosystem fundamentally changed.

I'm not apologizing for Google, they're intrinsically incentivized to behave badly, and the fact that they kill lots of good products is a sign of their myopic culture. I just want to indicate no ecosystem stay static when winners and losers exist.