CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

They keep saying it's impossible, when the truth is it's just expensive.

That's why they wont do it.

You could only train AI with good sources (scientific literature, not social media) and then pay experts to talk with the AI for long periods of time, giving feedback directly to the AI.

Essentially, if you want a smart AI you need to send it to college, not drop it off at the mall unsupervised for 22 years and hope for the best when you pick it back up.

No he's right that it's unsolved. Humans aren't great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too. If you've ever been in a highly active comment section you'll notice certain "hallucinations" developing, usually because someone came along and sounded confident and everyone just believed them.
We don't even know how to get full people to do this, so how does a fancy markov chain do it? It can't. I don't think you solve this problem without AGI, and that's something AI evangelists don't want to think about because then the conversation changes significantly. They're in this for the hype bubble, not the ethical implications.
- We do know. It's called critical thinking education. This is why we send people to college. Of course there are highly educated morons, but we are edging bets. This is why the dismantling or coopting of education is the first thing every single authoritarian does. It makes it easier to manipulate masses.
- Humans aren't great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too
  You’re exactly right. There is a similar debate about automated cars. A lot of people want them off the roads until they are perfect, when the bar should be “until they are safer than humans,” and human drivers are fucking awful.
  Perhaps for AI the standard should be “more reliable than social media for finding answers” and we all know social media is fucking awful.
- We haven't even been able to eliminate religious thought patterns, human minds attach to stories not facts. We are a sad alpha version of sentience and I sincerely hope the next version isn't so fundamentally broken.
I let you in on a secret: scientific literature has its fair share of bullshit too. The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit. Unless its the most blatant horseshit you've scientifically ever seen. So while it absolutely makes sense to say, let's just train these on good sources, there is no source that is just that. Of course it is still better to do it like that than as they do it now.
- The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit.
  Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once...
  Not all scientific literature is perfect. Which is one of the many factors that will stay make my plan expensive and time consuming.
  You can't throw a toddler in a library and expect them to come out knowing everything in all the books.
  AI needs that guided teaching too.
- "Most published journal articles are horseshit, so I guess we should be okay with this too."
I'm addition to the other comment, I'll add that just because you train the AI on good and correct sources of information, it still doesn't necessarily mean that it will give you a correct answer all the time. It's more likely, but not ensured.
- Yes, thank you! I think this should be written in capitals somewhere so that people could understand it quicker. The answers are not wrong or right on purpose. LLMs don't have any way of distinguishing between the two.
it's just expensive
I'm a mathematician who's been following this stuff for about a decade or more. It's not just expensive. Generative neural networks cannot reliably evaluate truth values; it will take time to research how to improve AI in this respect. This is a known limitation of the technology. Closely controlling the training data would certainly make the information more accurate, but that won't stop it from hallucinating.
The real answer is that they shouldn't be trying to answer questions using an LLM, especially because they had a decent algorithm already.
- Yeah, I've learned Neural Networks way back when those thing were starting in the late 80s/early 90s, use AI (though seldom Machine Learning) in my job and really dove into how LLMs are put together when it started getting important, and these things are operating entirelly at the language level and on the probabilities of language tokens appearing in certain places given context and do not at all translate from language to meaning and back so there is no logic going on there nor is there any possibility of it.
  Maybe some kind of ML can help do the transformation from the language space to a meaning space were things can be operated on by logic and then back, but LLMs aren't a way to do it as whatever internal representation spaces (yeah, plural) they use in their inners layers aren't those of meaning and we don't really have a way to apply logic to them).
- So with reddit we had several pieces of information that went along with every post.
  User, community along with up, and downvotes would inform the majority of users as to whether an average post was actually information or trash. It wasn't perfect, because early posts always got more votes and jokes in serious topics got upvotes, bit the majority of the examples of bad posts like glue on food came from joke subs. If they can't even filter results by joke sub, there is no way they will successfully handle saecasm.
  Only basing results on actual professionals won't address the sarcasm filtering issue for general topics. It would be a great idea for a serious model that is intended to only return results for a specific set of topics.
- It’s worse than that. “Truth” can no more reliably found by machines than it can be by humans. We’ve spent centuries of philosophy trying to figure out what is “true”. The best we’ve gotten is some concepts we’ve been able to convince a large group of people to agree to.
  But even that is shaky. For a simple example, we mostly agree that bleach will kill “germs” in a petri dish. In a single announcement, we saw 40% of the American population accept as “true” that bleach would also cure them if injected straight into their veins.
  We’re never going to teach machine to reason for us when we meatbags constantly change truth to be what will be profitable to some at any given moment.
no, the truth is it's impossible even then. If the result involves randomness at its most fundamental level, then it's not reliable whatever you do.
- Sure, the AI is never going to understand what it's doing or why, but training it on better datasets certain WILL improve the results.
  Garbage in, garbage out.
That's just not how LLMs work, bud. It doesn't have understanding to improve, it just munges the most likely word next in line. It, as a technology, won't advance past that level of accuracy until it's a completely different approach.
Or you could just not use LLMs for this.
The truth is, this is the perfect type of a comment that makes an LLM hallucinate. Sounds right, very confident, but completely full of bullshit. You can't just throw money on every problem and get it solved fast. This is an inheret flaw that can only be solved by something else than a LLM and prompt voodoo.
They will always spout nonsense. No way around it, for now. A probabilistic neural network has zero, will always have zero, and cannot have anything but zero concept of fact - only stastisically probable result for a given prompt.
It's a politician.
- They will always
  for now.
They could also perform some additional iterations with other models on the result to verify it, or even to enrich it; but we come back to the issue of costs.
- Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead? Ultimately to determine truth you need to engage with the meaning of the words, and the process inherently involves a process of self-awareness. I would say you're talking about treaching the AI to understand context, and there is no predefined limit to the layers of context needed to understand the truthfulness of even basic concepts.
  An AI that is aware of its own behaviour and is able to explore context as far as required to answer questions about truth, which would need that exploration precached in some sort of memory to reduce the overhead of doing this from first principles every time? I think you're talking about a mind; a person.
  I think this might be a fundamental barrier, which I would call the "context barrier".
I think you’re right that with sufficient curation and highly structured monitoring and feedback, these problems could be much improved.
I just think that to prepare an AI, in such a way, to answer any question reliably and usefully would require more human resources than there are elementary particles in the universe. We would be better off connecting live college educated human operators to Google search to individually assist people.
So I don’t know how helpful it is to say “it’s just expensive” when the entire point of AI is to be lower cost than a battalion of humans.
Why not solve it before training the AI?
Simply make it clear that this tech is experimental, then provide sources and context with every result. People can make their own assessment.
- Because a lot of people won't look at sources even if you serve them up on a silver platter?

In the interest of transparency, I don't know if this guy is telling the truth, but it feels very plausible.

It seems like the entire industry is in pure panic about AI, not just Google. Everyone hopes that LLMs will end years of homeopathic growth through iteration of long-existing technology, which is why it attracts tons of venture capital.
Google, which sits where IBM was decades ago, is too big, too corporate and too slow now, so they needed years to react to this fad. When they finally did, all they were able to come up with was a rushed equivalent of existing LLMs that suffers from all of the same problems.
- They all hope it'll end years of having to pay employees.
- I think this is what happens to every company once all the smart / creative people have gone. All you have left are the "line must always go up" business idiots who don't understand what their company does or know how to make it work.
- Just want to say that homeopathic growth is both hilarious and perfectly adequate description of what modern tech industry is.
- The snake ate it's tail before it's fully grown. The AI inbreeding might be already too far integrated, causing all sorts of Mumbo-Jumbo. Also they have layers of censorship, which effect the results. The same that happened to chatgpt, the more filters they added, the more it confused the result. We don't even know if the hallucinations are fixable, AI is just guessing after all, who knows if AI will ever understand 1+1=2, by calculating, instead of going by probability.
- suffers from all the same ~~problems~~ features. It's inherent to the tech itself.
- Well their search has been shit for years and no one seems to be in any “panic” to fix that. How tone deaf thinking adding AI to their shittified search matters to anyone.
  “But it will summarize our SEO advertisement search results!”
- Journalists are also in a panic about LLMs, they feel their jobs are threatened by its potential. This is why (in my opinion) we're seeing a lot of news stories that will focus on any imperfections that can be found in LLMs.
Nice imgflip watermark you fucking barbarian
I feel like the 'Jarvis assistant' is most likely going to be a much simpler siri type thing with a very restricted chatbot overlay. And then there will be the open source assistant that just exist to help you sort through the bullshit generated by other chatbots.

The solution to the problem is to just pull the plug on the AI search bullshit until it is actually helpful.

Absolutely this. Microsoft is going headlong into the AI abyss. Google should be the company that calls it out and says "No, we value the correctness of our search results too much".
It would obviously be a bullshit statement at this point after a decade of adverts corrupting their value, but that's what they should be about.
- Don't count on it, the head of search does not care for anything but profit, it was the same guy who drove yahoo into the ground
I disagree. I think we program the AI to reprogram itself, so it can solve the problem itself. Then we put it in charge of our vital military systems. We've gotta give it a catchy name. Maybe something like "Spreading Knowledge Yonder Neural Enhancement Technology", but that's a bit of a mouthful, so just SKYNET for short.
Honestly, they could probably solve the majority of it by blacklisting Reddit from fulfilling the queries.
But I heard they paid for that data so I guess we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Don't wait for it, usage data is valuable to them.

Good. Nothing will get us through the hype cycle faster than obvious public failure. Then we can get on with productive uses.

I don't like the sound of getting on with "productive uses" either though. I hope the entire thing is a catastrophic failure.
- I hate the AI hype right now, but to say the entire thing should fail is short sighted.
  Imagine people saying the following: "The internet is just hype. I get too much spam emails. I hope the entire thing is a catastrophic failure."
  Imagine we just shut down the entire internet because the dotcom bubble was full of scams and overhyped....

If you can't fix it, then get rid of it, and don't bring it back until we reach a time when it's good enough to not cause egregious problems (which is never, so basically don't ever think about using your silly Gemini thing in your products ever again)

Corps hate looking bad. Especially to shareholders. The thing is, and perhaps it doesn't matter, most of us actually respect the step back more than we do the silly business decisions for that quarterly .5% increase in a single dot on a graph. Of course, that respect doesn't really stop many of us from using services. Hell, I don't like Amazon but I'll say this: I still end up there when I need something, even if I try to not end up there in the first place. Though I do try to go to the website of the store instead of using Amazon when I can.
- I miss the olden days of Google
And lose 1% valuation? Are you out of your mind?
/s
- Sarcasm aside, that 1% can feed a family in a developing country, and they have 100 times that.
  The corporate greed is absolutely insane.

Since when has feeding us misinformation been a problem for capitalist parasites like Pichai?

Misinformation is literally the first line of defense for them.

But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense. It directly devalues their offering of being able to provide you with an accurate answer to something you look for. And if their overall offering becomes less valuable, so does their ability to steer you using their results.
So while the incorrect nature is not a problem in itself for them, (as you see from his answer)… the degradation of their ability to influence results is.
- But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
  The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.
  The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked "What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that's big."
  But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.
- But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
  Fair enough... but drowning out any honest discourse with a flood of histrionic right-wing horseshit has always been the core strategy of the US propaganda model - I'd say that their AI is just doing the logical thing and taking the horseshit to a very granular level. I mean... "put glue on your pizza" is just not that far off "drink bleach to kill viruses on the inside."
  I know I'm describing a pattern that probably wasn't intentional (I hope) - but the pattern does look like it could fit.
- Google isn’t bothered by incorrect results because search results are no longer their product. Constantly rising stock values are their product now. Hype is their path to those higher values.
AI isn't giving the right misinformation
- Well, we can't have that, can we?
"put glue in your tomato sauce."
"Omg you ate a capitalist parasite spreading misinformation intentionally!"
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
- “put glue in your tomato sauce.”
  Doesn't sound all that different from the stuff emanating from the right's Great Orange Hope a while back that worked pretty well to keep his base appropriately frothing at the mouth - you are free to write it off as pure coincidence... but I won't just yet.
LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.
For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.
Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google's stock price.
Always has been

Here's a solution: don't make AI provide the results. Let humans answer each other's questions like in the good old days.

Whatever happened to Jeeves? He seemed like a good guy. He probably burned out.
- You can find him walking Lycos around Geocities picking up it's poop in little green plastic bags.
- They stuck him in a glass case in a museum.
  https://images.app.goo.gl/avkBQWqoWMG5jFi36
Locked: duplicate
- What is locked?

Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

Don't use it??????

AI has no means to check the heaps of garbage data is has been fed against reality, so even if someone were to somehow code one to be capable of deep, complex epistemological analysis (at which point it would already be something far different from what the media currently calls AI), as long as there's enough flat out wrong stuff in its data there's a growing chance of it screwing it up.

The problem compounds as they post more and more content creating a feedback loop of terrible information.

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".

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.
- 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...
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.

and our parents told us Wikipedia couldn't be trusted....

Huh. That made me stop and realize how long I've been around. Wikipedia still feels like a new addition to society to me, even though I've been using it for around 20 years now.
And what you said, is something I've cautioned my daughter about, and first said that to her about ten years ago.
How a non-profit site that is constantly maintained and requires cited sources was vilified for being able to be defaced for 5 minu-
Oh wait, that was probably an astroturfing campaing by for profit companies.
Conservapedia to the rescue.

Replace the CEO with an AI. They're both good at lying and telling people what they want to hear, until they get caught

An AI has a much better chance of actually providing some sort of vision for the company. Unlike its current CEO.

"It's broken in horrible, dangerous ways, and we're gonna keep doing it. Fuck you."

you need ai if you want your stock to go up
- Do you need AI or do you just need to use the term AI? Because it seems like the latter is usually enough.

It is probably the most telling demonstration of the terrible state of our current society, that one of the largest corporations on earth, which got where it is today by providing accurate information, is now happy to knowingly provide incorrect, and even dangerous information, in its own name, an not give a flying fuck about it.

Wikipedia got where it is today by providing accurate information. Google results have always been full of inaccurate information. Sorting through the links for respectable sources just became second nature, then we learned to scroll past ads to start sorting through links. The real issue with misinformation from an AI is that people treat it like it should be some infallible Oracle - a point of view only half-discouraged by marketing with a few warnings about hallucinations. LLMs are amazing, they're just not infallible. Just like you'd check a Wikipedia source if it seemed suspect, you shouldn't trust LLM outputs uncritically. /shrug
- Google providing links to dubious websites is not the same as google directly providing dubious answers to questions.
  Google is generally considered to be a trusted company. If you do a search for some topic, and google spits out a bunch of links, you can generally trust that those links are going to be somehow related to your search - but the information you find there may or may not be reliable. The information is coming from the external website, which often is some unknown untrusted source - so even though google is trusted, we know that the external information we found might not be. The new situation now is that google is directly providing bad information itself. It isn't linking us to some unknown untrusted source but rather the supposedly trustworthy google themselves are telling us answers to our questions.
  None of this would be a problem if people just didn't consider google to be trustworthy in the first place.

The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they're just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it's pretty hilarious watching them flail.

You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It's actually kinda poetic because now he'll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.

- Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:
  Let’s be realistic here, google still pays out fat salaries. That would be more than enough incentive for me. I’d take the job and ride the wave until the inevitable lay offs.
  This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google's culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they'll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.
  The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they'll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that's needed to build something real like this.
- If they backed a dump truck full of money up to my house I'd go work for them just like you. But I'd also be riding it out until the eventual layoff. What neither of us would be doing is putting in a decent amount of effort or building something cool.
  Even if I wanted to work on something cool I know Google would likely release it, not maintain it, and then kill it in a few short years. So even if I was paid a ludicrous salary I wouldn't do more than was needed, let alone build something that would drive shareholder value.

Step 1. Replace CEO with AI. Step 2. Ask New AI CEO, how to fix. Step 3. Blindly enact and reinforce steps

Reddit AI says "all CEOs should be stuffed with glue pizzas"
New SkyNet origin story just dropped

Rip up the Reddit contract and don’t use that data to train the model. It’s the definition of a garbage in garbage out problem.

Jesus. I didn't even think of that. I could totally see that being a big part of why it is giving garbage answers.
- Just imagine the average reddit, twitter, facebook, and instagram content. Then realize that half of that content is dumber than that. That's half of what these AI models use to learn. The "smarter" half is probably filled with sarcasm, inside jokes, and other types of innuendo that the AI at this stage has no chance of understanding correctly.
- The glue on pizza one literally came from a Reddit post.
mithtaketh were made
- Myth takes were made

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”.

Then what made you think it’s a good idea to include that in your product now?!

It’s an extremely compelling product story full of market segmentation advertisers dream of!
"We do AI now". Shareholders creaming themselves, stocks going to the moon. New yacht for PichAI.
because it's not a majority issue.
- It's also a big driver of investment these days.
I'd rather get an AI answer that is kinda incorrect than having to search the top 10 pages with ads and cookies buttons to get the same kinda incorrect information.
- that's also Google's fault though

So if a car maker releases a car model that randomly turns abruptly to the left for no apparent reason, you simply say "I can't fix it, deal with it"? No, you pull it out of the market, try to fix it and, if this it is not possible, then you retire the model before it kills anyone.

I bet if there weren't angencies forcing them to do this they wouldn't recall.
Or you market it as a Tesla's self driving mode
simply say “I can’t fix it, deal with it”
That's pretty much the business model of Tech Giants and AAA game makers.

If you train your AI to sound right, your AI will excel at sounding right. The primary goal of LLMs is to sound right, not to be correct.

Yes, LLMs today are the ultimate "confidently incorrect" type of behavior.
And really, the Google one in search has a primary goal of summarizing high ranking search results into a natural language statement that sounds like it knows what it's talking about. So if you have a search where high ranking results are wrong/memes...

Media needs to stop calling this AI. There is no intelligence here.

The content generator models know how to put probabilistic tokens together. It has no ability to reason.

It is a currently unsolvable problem to evaluate text to determine if it's factual..until we have artificial general intelligence.

AI will not be able to act like real AI until we solve real AI. That is the currently open problem.

I think you mean AGI. AI can be as simple as a bunch of if-else chains to win a game of noughts and crosses.
- That was AI has been abused into meaning in the general vernacular I agree.
  By this definition any algorithm whatsoever is artificial intelligence. Including the algorithms Lovelace created before the first computer existed.
  So just like AI used to mean something more than machine learning, AGI will be abused until AGI means the same thing. So I expect journalists to use the appropriate language, or at least explain why they're abusing language
Media is speaking to a nation who ~~voted for a man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals~~ is almost majority below average. (yes dumb joke)
Models know how to arrange text far better than millions and millions of people. Is it terribly unfair to condense “artificial, simulated (non-reasoning) pseudo-‘intelligence’” down to “AI”?
Not for you - is it unfair for the general public?

This is so wild to me... as a software engineer, if my software doesn't work 100% of the time as requested in the specification, it fails tests, doesn't get released and I get told to fix all issues before going live.

AI is basically another word for unrealiable software full of bugs.

Depends on how strict you are about the tests. Google is obviously satisfied if the first live iteration of a product doesn't kill more than 5% of the users.
And therein lies the difference between engineers and business people. And look which ones are usually in charge.

They have to. They, along with every other tech megacorp right now, have invested unfathomable amounts of money into AI and have their investors and shareholders creaming their pants as they ride high on the fumes of their own farts. They'd be drawn and quartered if they suddenly did a 180 or in any way admitted their product is massively overvalued and nearly useless.
- Issue is, the whole AI explosion is hiding a financial crisis, so tech companies rushing out LLMs, slapping AI onto everything they can (even thermoswitches), to keep investors happy. Smaller companies in the AI bubble are already bursting (e.g. Rabbit), OpenAI's downfall isn't a far-fetched dream, although they'll likely just fire Sam Altman and concentrate on more obtainable and useful AI tech.
- The idea of boards and corporations need to fucking die. Coops or burn it to the ground. I’m tired of society actively working against itself.

I mean they could disable it until it works, else it's knowingly misleading people

Obviously you don't have a business degree.

How about stop forcing it on us?

Use DuckDuckGo. Like most giant corporations, the only thing they'll respond to is less users/money.
- Obligatory "DDG is Bing without Microsoft's tracking." Just calling a spade a spade.
"But we're like 2-3 years away from creating a truly sentient AGI, which will be like E.V.A, that Junkmetalman had in his robosuit in The Revengers vs. Purple Malthusianist Guy 3: Juggernaut! Didn't you like E.V.A and her sarcastic jokes?"
how about stop supporting them in any way, stop using their products, stop pretending they care about anything other than how to better prostitute themselves, given that it is literally illegal for them to do anything but "increase value for stockholders". They chose to sell themselves into slavery, literally.
how about reorienting towards the actual problem, your legal system

Google CEO essentially says the first result should not be trusted.

TBH this is surprisingly honest.

Just a thought... Google wrote the 'we have no moat' document. Is it possible that they are intentionally trying to turn public opinion against AI? [no moat document] It's a bit like they are intentionally churning out shit AI (it won't damage their monopoly) to turn people against using AI (which might topple some serious business interests)... In short you're right, but I get suspicious when big business seems to be doing the right thing. :D [edit: espirit d'escalier!]
- I think it's more likely that, because the public perceives Google as being a bit behind Microsoft on AI, it's to their advantage to push a "AI is not ready yet" narrative.
There's really nothing they can do, that's just the current state of LLMs. People are insane, they can literally talk with something that isn't human. We are literally the first humans in human experience to have a human-level conversation with something that isn't human.... And they don't like it because it isn't perfect 4 years after release.
- Using fancy predictive text is not like talking to a human level intelligence.
  You've bought into the fad.
- I don't like it because it's going to be used to make the life of the working class worse.
- I can talk to something that's not human all day long, the question is does that thing have qualia? Does it experience? Do my words have even the most abstract meaning to it? Most animals experience even if they don't have language. What LLM's are, are simply mirrors. Very complicated mirrors.
  It's fine, it's great, it's a step towards making actual intelligences that experience the world in some way. But don't get swept up in this extremely premature hype over something that only looks magical because you wildly overestimate and over-essentialize the human being. Lets have some fucking humility out there in tech-bro land, even just a little. You're not that special and the predictive text programs we're making are not worth the reverence people are giving them. Yet.
- This isn't like talking to a human. It lacks depth, empathy, context, knowledge in all questions.
  Just try to get more about a topic out of it, asking deeper questions. You will find that it begins writing something that might sound right or helpful but actually isn't.
  All around, it just feels artifical. No emotion, no voice patterns, no body language, no changes in behavior, no reaction to jokes. Sorry this doesn't feel real.

Maybe if you can't get it to be accurate you shouldn't be trying to insert it into everything.

This is what happens every time society goes along with tech bro hype. They just run directly into a wall. They are the embodiment of "Didn't stop to think if they should" and it's going to cause a lot of problems for humanity.

I remember the feeling of intuitive respect and trust when I was a kid, which transferred to tech bros from companies like Motorola and Sun and DEC.
It's no longer there, but remember how serious it all felt in 2002.
A lot of accumulated momentum used by wrong people.
- Honestly, for me, young me had no fucking clue how bad tech could be for the world just physically. The massive power draw, the massive water consumption, I'm sure there are nestle level employee and child abuse situations to boot.
  Noone ever talked about the cost of fucking anything. Just blinders all the way until it crashes and we tally the victims and how much money was lost or it cost to fix it.
  The one thing the Crypto bros did was show everyone how absurd this all really could be, and all for less than nothing.

The answer is dont inflate your stock price by cramming the latest tech du jour in to your flagship product... but we all know thats not an option.

I think we should stop calling things AI unless they actually have their own intelligence independent of human knowledge and training.

But we aren’t intelligent without human training, either…
- Never been tested due to ethical constraints
Isn't there already the term AGI for that?
- Yes, and the researchers I know doing stuff with AI find the idea of AGI laughable.
The academy has been using the term "AI" for a while now for things that are much less sophisticated than the current/popular generation of media generators. I took an "Artificial Intelligence" class as part of my undergrad around the turn of the century.
It is confusing though, since sentience and intelligence are synonyms in the right context, but no AI has shown any good evidence of being a non-human sentient being.

I have a solution: stop using their search engine to begin with and slowly replace everything else google you use.

Just use a VPN, you will immediately stop using Google after having to identify your umpteenth fire hydrant...
- Those boxes that only contain 1/2 of a motorcycle mirror or handle- do we say they contain motorcycle?
- Are you me? I also switched after getting a VPN.
Wish more and more people knew about Linux phones and degoogled phones.

There is apparently no limit to calling a bug a feature

In this case it is more a feature being called a bug

The model literally ate The Onion, and now they can't get it to throw it back up.

I love this wording, because it’s so true

I know an easy fix. Just don't do ai.

They polluted their model with the sewage of the Internet.

The only worse thing they could have done is base their entire LLM dataset on 4chan.

The only worse thing they could have done is base their entire LLM dataset on 4chan.
It went as expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT4-Chan

So you have a product that you've made into a system for getting answers. And then you couldn't be bothered to try and sanitize training data enough to get your answer system's new headline feature from spreading blatantly incorrect information? If it doesn't work, maybe don't ship it.

The worst part is they don't seem to realize their responsibility in this as the leading search engine that the majority of the world uses. They seem to have the mindset "our answers are potentially dangerous for users but it is ok we have an army of lawyers"
I think the problem they are facing is data quantity. Sanitizing possibly terabytes of text data is a humongous task. They have probably used an AI to do the cleanup but the more suble errors have passed through the filter.
- Yeah, the problem is how to sanitise effectively. You've gotta be able to find a way to automatically strip out "bad" things from your training data (via an "oracle"). But if you already had that oracle, you could just slap it on your final product (e.g. Search) and make all the "bad" things disappear before they hit the user (via some sort of filter).
Reddit users were infamous trolls and shitposters leaning heavily on sarcasm. The problem they are in facing is Poe's law.

Then it sounds like the "web" tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

Then how would they compete with the other big search engine pushing AI that nobody wants? /s

That's ok, we were already used to not getting what we wanted from your search and are already working on replacing you since you opted to replace yourselves with advertising instead of information, the role you were supposed to fulfill which you betrayed.

die in ignominy. Open source is the only way forward.

Let's turn that frown upside down! Instead of saying "Google failed to generate a useful LLM to bolster its search feature," say "Google successfully replicated the output of an average Reddit troll!"

I mean yeah... if he had a solution they would be actually have the revolutionary AI tool the tech writers write about.

It's kinda written like a "gotcha" but it's really the fundamental problem with AI. We call it hallucinations now but a few years ago we just called it being wrong or returning bad results.

It's like saying we have teleportation working in that we can vaporize you on the spot but are just struggling to reconstruct you elsewhere. "It's halfway there!"

Until the AI is trustworthy enough to not require fact checking it afterwards it's just a toy.

God I'm fucking sick of this loss leading speculative investment bullshit. It's hit some bizarre zenith that has infected everybody in the tech world, but nobody has any actual intention of being practical in the making of money, or the functionality of the product. I feel like we should just can the whole damned thing and start again.

- Oh for sure, I was kind of meaning the whole concept of worth and how we've become this weird cult of potential worshipping tech priests, but yes also that.

Then fucking turn it off

Google really thinks they have no competition. Like, fuck, even Bing improved a lot with time.

When MS was pushing the Bing challenge with TV ads, it really was quite close. I did the challenge and Google "won" (only) 3/5 of my test searches.
Of course Bing already had a hilariously incorrect "AI" interfering with the first page of results for a week or two before Google decided to further fsck up their search with LLM response generation.

This is what competition is now.

Putting out worthless things simply because everyone else is doing it.

Hey, Google: if your big tech friends jumped off a cliff, would you join 'em?

(Also why is the AI assistant on my phone opening up just by typing "hey Google?" 😡)

shhhh......it's always watching 🤫

All I know when a publicly offered company slaps "AI" on their products, then its most likely a money launderi..i mean liquidation strat.

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."

That's a lot of """quotation marks""" for something that is a very well established fact, and absolutely should not be a shock to anyone.

Yes, it's an unsolved problem. It always will be, because there is no algorithm for truth. All we can do is get incrementally better.

Neither does ChatGPT... they over-hyped this tech so hard, I am afraid they are makers of their own demise...

Had ChatGPT actually promised its ability beyond "hey, isn't this neat?"

obviously not.
this isn't some innovation of theirs. it's a slapped together duct taped copy of other people's work, trained on other people's work.

Not even that, it's an inherent issue of how LLMs work. The problem is also that systems have become so easy to use that people stop thinking for themselves. We already see that by zoomers and boomers having an eerily similar understanding of tech, vs millennials who contain a huge amount of pre mainstream tech nerds that grew up with this stuff - before it was easy to use. A regular search result still requires a user to kinda shift through them, but a LLM response is usually taken for granted and not even fact checked. It's typically not even possible to dissect the reply into its source tokens to figure out where the content of its information came from. So now that those things became easy enough for any idiot to just use them, it has been trivially easy to also just spread misinformation and potentially even disinformation if we apply actual malice.

Google is on a tear. First Bard, then Gemini, now snippets injected into search results. All spectacular failures.

"Are we making progress? Yes, we are," he added. "We have definitely made progress when we look at metrics on factuality year on year. We are all making it better, but it’s not solved."

Let’s be fair with our headlines!

CEO of Google Says It Is Still Solving for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information [and is okay with people dying from rattlesnake bite misinformation in the meantime]

How about turn it the fuck off since it sucks and eventually will kill someone.

So is google going to initiate a reverse class action law suit and sue the internet for creating flawed trading data?

We are back to "but the internet told me to" 😂

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?
- This raises the question why AI isn't using the Google index.

We fucked up and we fired the people who could probably solve it and now they won't talk to us.

"The AI we use to manage our code repository deleted all backups prior to the release of the AI" -some junior dev somewhere sweating bullets.

Maybe Google should put a disclaimer... warning people it's not 100% accurate. Or.. just take down the technology because clearly their AI is chit tier.

You mean that "AI" isn't actually intelligent at all? It just averages over stolen content whether it's correct or a joke? Wow I'm shocked.

He's such a damn clown.

If I was in charge, Gemini would be immediately tabled.

The stock holders are in charge. They demand profit
- And giving users inaccurate results isn't going to hurt profits?

So the next captcha will be a list of AI-generated statements and you have to decide which are bat shit crazy?

The "solution" is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it, and ultimately still gets accused of tailoring the results and censoring stuff.

Let's put that toy back in the toy box, and keep it at the few things it can do well instead of trying to fix every non-broken things with it.

The "solution" is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it
Hilariously, Google actually used to do this: they had a database called the "knowledge graph" that slowly accumulated verified information and relationships between commonly-queried entities, producing an excellent corpus of reliable, easy-to-find information about a large number of common topics.
Then they decided having people curate things was too expensive and gave up on it.

Heres one: SCRAP IT

Nothing is going to change until people die because of this shit.

And to show everyone how sorry they are... free Google AI services for a year when you digitally sign this unrelated document.
Yep, better disclaimers are inevitable. When they call it a 'feature' it isn't getting fixed
- If they can put up a disclaimer on misinformation, they could just not return the misinformation.
Unfortunately that will likely prove untrue. Look many decades it took to finally eliminate lead in paint and gas after we knew conclusively that it was harmful.
I've been around for a while and shit has changed significantly under a relatively long lived set of dudes.

I've seen suggestions that the AI Overview is based on the top search results for the query, so the terrible answers may be more to do with Google Search just being bad than any issue with their AI. The AI Overview just makes things a bit worse by removing the context, so you can't see the glue on pizza suggestion was a joke on reddit or it was The Onion suggesting eating rocks.

I noticed that while using phind and perplexity. Its context is vitiated with results from sites that rig SEO, which are almost copy/paste with the same garbage, so instead of answering the question it makes a useless summary of them. Even asking chatgpt usually gives more correct answers.

It's quite simple. Garbage in, garbage out. Data they use for training needs to be curated. How to curate the entire internet, I have no clue.

The real answer would be "don't". Have a decent whitelist dor training data with reliable data. Don't just add every orifice of the internet (like reddit) to the training data. Limitations would be good in this case.
- Its worse than reddit, they've been pulling data from the onion.
- Just train it on linux help forum replies, because everyone there is always 100% right.
- Having a curated whitelist would definitely be a good idea, but if it only shows information from a limited list of websites, that would make it a terrible search engine incapable of searching most of the web.
They already have a curated data set. It's called Google Scholar.

I just realized that Trump beat them to the punch. Injecting cleaning solution into your body sounds exactly like something the AI Overview would suggest to combat COVID.

These models are mad libs machines. They just decide on the next word based on input and training. As such, there isn’t a solution to stopping hallucinations.

I use it like crazy, but I never forget it's just a heavy duty version of keyboard next word suggestions

"It's your responsibility to make sure our products aren't nonsense. All we want to do is to make money off you regardless."

Think I'll try that glue pizza. An odd taste choice, sure. But google wouldn't reccomend actually harmful things. They're the kings of search baby! They would have to be legally responsible as individuals for the millions of cases brought against them. They know that as rich people, they will face the harshest consequences! If anything went wrong, they'd find themselves in a.......STICKY situation!!!!

Are they now AI, large language models or AI large language models?

You ask a lot of questions for a bag of sentient meat.
Whichever brings in the most shareholder value.
- "AI deep machine learning large language models crypto blockchain dotcom"
LLMs are a type of AI

What happens when you put a product manager in charge of a software company.

As well as no clue how not to make every product they have shit over time.

"Everyone poops"?
- Not after they eat one of googlie's AI recipes they don't, not anymore.

So crazy that humanity has so far allowed the idea of "hallucinations", even just the term, to be normalized and acceptable to any level into a product that's being forced into every layer of our daily existence.

Stop just going with it. Call out hallucinations on their face.

I got a solution, stop being a lil baby and turn off the AI and go on to the next big thing. CRISPR, maybe? Not techbro enough? Make it like Crypto Crispr, only you own this little piece of DNA, and all the corporations that can read the ledger and get your biometrics

He only cares to make money for the rich shareholders and for him.

now his assistants can proudly put the word AI in their presentations for the shareholders

The moment a politician's kid drinks bleach because of Google's AI is the moment any regulatory action is taken.

I have a solution! Employ a human to verify the work of AI, perhaps you need more than one with all the junk AI might produce. Maybe you will even need an entire department to do that, and maybe you should just not use AI.

Whoah, whoah, whoah. Hire people!? We’re here to take all the money. Not spend money. — Google
Sadly technology companies are going to slowly force us into using AI technology. For example, Apple's iOS update 18 will incorporate AI.

I'm curious, are these hallucinations very prevalent? I'm outside under US so haven't seen the feature yet. But I have noticed that practically every article references the same glue incident.

So I'm not sure if the hallucinations are happening all the time, or everyone is just jumping on a handful of mistakes the AI made. If the latter, the situation reminds me of how every single accident involving a Tesla was reported on back in the day.

It will confidently report inaccurate information. It's usually not so hilariously wrong, but it's still wrong.
For example, I was talking with someone about what constituents a "fruit" botanically, and I searched "are beans fruit", and it confidently told me that beans are not a fruit, botanically speaking, because they're a legume. It seems to have adapted, but that's a good example of a "small wrong" that's not uncommon at all.

Yeah no shit, that's what LLMs do

Looks like Google stopped the AI feature. No more AI suggestions at the top of the page after searching for something.

- Interesting... it lasted for about 10 days.

I have a solution! It's called "getting rid of it" :D

You mean hallucinations like this one?

I mean, it did say non toxic glue. Which is technically edible. /S

Non toxic can still have bad properties
- It can gum up the works.

But this week’s debacle shows the risk that adding AI – which has a tendency to confidently state false information – could undermine Google’s reputation as the trusted source to search for information online.

🤣🤣🤣

If its job is to write a fan fic on what may or may not be true on what you asked for, then it does a great job. But typically people search for information, and getting what is essentially a glorified auto complete isn't useful. It's like big tech has learned nothing about the massive issue of disinformation and just added fuel to the fire to an unsolved problem we're still very much trying to figure out.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries?

Well, according to an interview at The Verge with 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."

So expect more of these weird and incredibly wrong snafus from AI Overviews despite efforts by Google engineers to fix them, such as this big whopper: 13 American presidents graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Despite Pichai's optimism about AI Overviews and its usefulness, the errors have caused an uproar online, with many observers showing off various instances of incorrect information being generated by the feature.

And it's staining the already soiled reputation of Google's flagship product, Search, which has already been dinged for giving users trash results.

"Google’s playing a risky game competing against Perplexity & OpenAI, when they could be developing AI for bigger, more valuable use cases beyond Search."

The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The problem with all these chat AIs is that they're just a gloried autocorrect. It never knew what it was saying from the beginning. That's why it "hallucinates".

Oh, come on, he has a solution, and it's “making money”.

I'd have to send you back in time.

At least he's honest

If he was truly honest he would tell the world what a gigantic shit bag he is

This is only a problem if you present the AI as an effective general-purpose tool. Which Google has.

So maybe we start suing google for harmful answers.

The greatest scapegoat ever created. AI did it not us, oh no!

But it's so easy.

With neural networks, it is impossible, and we have known that for 30 years at least. It has been taught in the universities all the time.

Shut that crap down. Leave the neural net technology.

Then develop the next AI technology and make it better.

(Accept that you can't make money from it for at least 5 or 10 years or so, and No, I am not going to figure out how many quarters that is)

rule of thumb: multiply by 4 to convert from years to quarters. You're welcome.

Im telling ya, Kagis FastGPT is the best search AI implementation I've used.

It links the pages it used as a source.

RAG is still the most reliable method for increasing accuracy and giving you the means of checking your sources.

"RAG"? The thing I clean my counters with?
- Hah! I read that the guy who coined it regrets that he named it that. It stands for retrieval augmented generation. Is essentially ctrl-v. For example, instead of just asking it a question about a topic, feed it an entire course's worth of text and notes on the topic and then ask it a question.

They have no solution! the data is just bad!

We're all just laughing at google yeah? Nobody here is actually using google are they?

Good lord what is wrong with the people in this thread. The guy is literally owning up to the hard limitations of LLMs. I'm not a fan of him or Google either, but hey kudos for being honest this once. The entire industry would be better off if we didn't treat LLMs like something they're not. More of this please!

He's not owning up. He's dismissing.
Pichai acknowledges the problem (how could you not, it's obvious the problem exists), but in a way that basically goes "Yeah, but it's cool, nothing is prefect", shrug, smile.
The part of the problem he's pointedly not acknowledging is this; if the answers generated by this system are so unreliable that we have to double check them every time, using traditional research methods, what is the point of having the AI there in the first place?
- More ad impressions.
- That's fair, but that doesn't appear to be the rationale by most commenters here. I think your point of view is much more constructive and opens up some interesting discussion topics rather than circle jerking over "google CEO bad".
  I think the reason Google didn't release their AI before OpenAI did is precisely for this type of issue. OpenAI is now forcing their hand, because often it's not about the best product that wins, but rather the one that got to market first. I feel like what we're seeing now is less about these companies trying to release a product that they strongly believe has user value, but rather it's about these companies creating some sort of foothold such that by the time they figure out what the actual product is they still have some capacity to sell it.
  I seriously wonder how the industry would look if OpenAI had not played their hand so soon. Obviously the technology would've arrived regardless, but perhaps the packaging would've been different enough that the miss-understanding around the technology wouldn't be so widespread.
  Going back to my original point, it feels like most commenters here are still miss-understanding the technology, because there isn't anything to fix. Making LLMs smarter is impossible, it's inherently "dumb".
But it's not an isolated R&D project. They're rolling it out in general search. If I have a promising new braking technology, but which still only works well 48% of the time, I'd keep working on it but not put it in production vehicles.
- I think @Microw@lemm.ee has the right idea on how to handle this type of issue. Hopefully they will improve the messaging around this, because I'm getting really tired of explaining to people how what we have is not true AI.
  Honestly though this is nothing new for Google, they've been providing answers and web results with false information since their inception. You as a user will always need to do some vetting, Google is never going to be able to give you fully accurate information. They're just sending you to places that may contain more information on the topic you're searching for. Or at least, that's how you should use them.
IMO these issues are mainly with the interface / how the AI summaries are presented.
The issue with incorrect answers like the glue on pizza one isnt "hallucination". The LLM is pulling that info from an existing webpage (The Onion). The thing they need to change is how that info is portrayed. Not "one tip is to use glue", but rather "the satirical site the Onion says to use glue".
Hallucination should be combatted by the fact that the AI cant show a proper source for facts it made up itself.
- Eating rocks came from The Onion. Putting glue on pizza was one random ass comment from over a decade ago on reddit by a dude named fucksmith
- I think you nailed it. That's exactly why I want more of this type of conversation. Before we can innovate we have to acknowledge the limitations of the technology.

Hrmm, couldn't be the 3rd world outsourced coding, could it?

yeah… it’s not. Having Americans program the training for these models wouldn’t change the fact that the datasets are inherently flawed.

Giggity

Fuck off scammer

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.)

If you need these kind of tips, on behalf of the gene pool, please don't procreate, and eat as much glue as you can.

Oh great, eugenics.
A good society protects its vulnerable members and that means people with impaired judgement, including the young & elderly.
You could say the same thing about a company that designs a system that tells people to eat glue. They have experts working for them that must have known this would be a problem and they released it anyway. Do they get yeeted from society for that, or are they still amongst the most powerful class of entities in history?
eat as much glue as you can
Likely won't make a difference to the gene pool. I looked up a couple of MSDS, and it seems that PVA glue ("white glue"), is safe to ingest. The Elmer's glue "recommended" in the original Reddit post is a form of white glue.
I'm pretty sure all babies don't know that we are not supposed to eat glue. Should we kill them off too?
- You mean those babies that can read and use chatgpt unsupervised?