Technology

The head of Google Search

FTFY

Prabhakar Raghavan. Name and shame! You can thank this douchebag for Google's tumble down a cliff.

No, hallucination is a really good term. It can be super confident and seemingly correct but still completely made up.

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.

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.

LLM aka a Large Language Memes

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm probably late, but in this case this is the combinations of 2 things.

1. The usual capitalistic incentives ruined yet another company. There was a recent article about how Google pushed out the people who builded and maintaned search on favor of MBA growth focused assholes. Like they put the guy that was Yahoo's CEO while Yahoo search was crumbling, in charge of Google search to get him to increase the amount of searches they serve, and ads obviously. People keep suggesting to use DDG, or Kagi, or some other comercial product. And for now, we must because Google is basically useless right now. But just give time to the other companies to fall in the same trap hahaha.
2. LLMs are not smart, not even close. They are just a parlor trick that has non technical people fooled. There is a lot of evidence to me, but to me the most obvious one is that they don't have anything resembling human short term memory. Like the way they make them look like they are having a conversation is by providing the entire conversation up to that point, including their own previous responses lol, as input/context so the bot autocompletes the conversation. It literally can't remember a single word of what you said on it's own. But sureee, they are just like humans lol.

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.

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.

You're right that they arent hallucinations.
The current issue isn't just summarized web page, its that the model for gemini is all of reddit. And because it only fakes understanding context, it takes shitposts as truth.

The trap is that reddit is maybe 5% useful content and the rest is shitposts and porn.

You probably live in one of those "socialist" countries that has, like, consumer protection laws and stuff.