The head of Google *Search right now is the same guy that was head of yahoo search when it was dying. To put all of this in perspective.
The head of Google Search
FTFY
Thanks.
Being a CEO must be amazing. You can fail and even bring an entire company down, and keep on getting the same job somewhere else.
He has experience and obviously that means he learned a lesson after failing at a job that requires being a belligerent asshole to get.
Can we swap out the word "hallucinations" for the word "bullshit"?
I think all AI/LLM stuf should be prefaced as "someone down the pub said..."
So, "someone down the pub said you can eat rocks" or, "someone down the pub said you should put glue on your pizza".
Hallucinations are cool, shit like this is worthless.
No, hallucination is a really good term. It can be super confident and seemingly correct but still completely made up.
It is, but it isnt applicable in at least the glue-pizza situation as the probable source comment has been found on reddit.
A better use of the term might be how when you try to get Bing's image creator to make "Battletech" art, you just mostly get really obvious Warhammer 40k Space Marines and occasionally Iron Maiden album art.
Google search isnt a hallucination now though.
It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with. For example, the "glue on pizza" comment is from a reddit user called FuckSmith roughly 11 years ago.
It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with.
What do you mean by that? This isn't some secret but literally how LLMs work. lol What people mean by hallucinating is when LLMs "create" facts that aren't any. Be it this genius recipe of glue pizza, or any other wild combination of its model's source material. The whole cooking thing is a great analogy actually because it's like all of their fed information are the ingredients, and it just spits out various recipes based on those ingredients, without any guarantee that it is actually edible.
Testing in Prod. Stay classy, Google.
“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement to Gizmodo, noting many of the examples the company has seen have been from uncommon queries.
This is entirely fair. There is no way that anyone at Google could have anticipated that humans would search for strange things on the internet.
The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information
According to some fuckwitted Google rep, and I wouldn't trust them any further than I could throw them.
Although any sociologist or veteran of the internet will tell you humans will engage in any exploit that yields a funny result. The Diet Coke + Mentos rule.
And that means we'll actively search for hilarious Google AI responses.
Google is so f double-plus filthy rich, it is obligated to run its projects by experts or be relentlessly mocked. So it should have known this was the outcome.
Unless this is 5D chess and Google is willfilly using itself as a cautionary tale to discourage future webservice sites from arbitrarily inserting AI into its features.
"Hey, we just promised you answers. We never promised you correct answers." -- Google Marketing, probably.
On the other hand, all these AI errors by Google have made for some great memes recently.
LLM aka a Large Language Memes
I mean.. yeah layoff a whole bunch of people and start treating your employees like replaceable commodities.. then go ahead and arrogantly deploy technology you don't understand and :surprisepikachu: everything breaks.
But management get to do things without personal consequence, as they'll just lay off more workers to cover their absolute incompetence and things will continue to get worse.
Perhaps we should be replacing C-suite dipshits with AI's instead.
Why does search need to be AI? I've had no problems finding any information I wanted under the former process.
I think the idea is that you won't even leave the Google page at all, they want to keep you on their site and serve you their ads instead of sending you to someone else's site and giving someone else that sweet sweet ad revenue.
I think it's been a long time since digital companies tried to solve actual problems.
You obviously haven’t used the ~~web3 nocode blockchain NFT~~ AI enough to have an informed opinion.
It’s become more efficient to get basic info on virtually any topic by just asking an LLM like ChatGPT and that could be a serious threat to Google Search. People might form the habit of asking AIs for everything and then go to Google Search only when they want to dig deeper / find relevant articles etc. So I assume they added their own AI right into Search in an effort to continue being the first (and perhaps only) place one goes to for information.
Today I caught myself unconsciously went to Duckduckgo to make a search (even tho the browser start page is already google).
Thinking back, I've been using duckduckgo more than google, and often because I can't find what I'm looking for on Google but ads and autogenerated fake webpages.
History will prove it once again, there's no such thing as "too big to fail".
There's no better time to switch your default search engine!
TBH I hate the term "hallucination" in this context. It's just more BS anthropomorphizing. More marketing for "AI" (also BS). Can't we just call it like garbage or GIGO or something more accurate? This is nothing new. I know that scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing but just saying...
scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing
Even though I agree in this context “hallucination” is actually the scientific term. It might be poorly chosen but in LLM circles if you use the term hallucination, the vast majority of people, will understand precisely what you mean, namely not an error in programming, or a bad dataset, but rather that the language model worked well, generating sentences that are syntactically correct, that are roughly thematically coherent, and yet are factually incorrect.
So I obviously don't want to support marketing BS, in AI or elsewhere, but here sadly it matches the scientific naming.
PS: FWIW I believed I made a similar critic few months, or maybe even years, ago. IMHO what's more important is arguably questioning the value of LLMs themselves, but then it might not be as evident for many people who are benefiting from the current buzz.
This is what I love about Mike Judge's work. It turns out to be always the best metaphor/reference/prophecy of the boring dystopia. Since 1999.
Idiocracy is the most unrealistic sci-fi/apocolyptic film ever made. President Comacho finds the most qualified person to help with a crisis, asks them for advice and then doesnt take credit for it. Noone put in a position of power would ever do that.
Like we’ve seen before with AI chatbots, this technology seems to confuse satire with journalism
Unfortunately so does my aunt. And she's allowed to vote.
Does anyone have a realistic idea of how this happened? I get Google has been fallen off for awhile but they're still a multi billion dollar company.
AI doesn't exist. It's a huge model that aggregates existing shit with some filler content to glue it all together. It is not sentient, it's not creative, it's literally a stochastic parrot
So, when the original content is garbage, the output is also garbage. Shit in shit out when you train from fucking Reddit
Worked for a company that had google as a client:
Google sucks, everyone who works there is an idiot who sniffs their ass all day, nothing works, nothing gets fixed, it's all just held together with duct tape.
I can't imagine a ton of the people working there give a shit anymore when it seems like thousands of people are being layed off weekly while the company takes in billions in profit
Easy: worse results with more ads means more searches and thus more ad impressions, therefore profit.
That'll only work for so long, but that seems to be what they're doing.
Always remember that having more money doesn't mean someone (or some entity) is more capable or intelligent. It just means they have way more latitude to fuck up, higher potential to hurt more people, and less chance of facing negative consequences when they do.
I'm probably late, but in this case this is the combinations of 2 things.
So what we have here is obvious, we have a company trying to grow like cancer by any means necessary. And now they have a technology that allows them to create enough smoke and mirrors to fool non technical people. Sadly, as part of this they are also destroying the last places of the internet not fully controlled by corporations. Let's hope lemmy survives, but it's just a matter of time before they flood this place too.
Ah, so it only affects searching from the US for now. I already wondered why I couldn't reproduce the stuff I saw here and why I didn't really see a change at my Google results.
You probably live in one of those "socialist" countries that has, like, consumer protection laws and stuff.
Tinfoil hat time. Do you think Google intended this to work well? Or are we talking a lot more about Google and LLMs than we would have otherwise?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
