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.”
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.
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.
similarly i’m tired of apple fanboys pretending the company hasn’t gotten dramatically worse since jobs died as well. yeah he sucked in his own ways but things were starkly less shitty and belittling. tim cook would be gone for those fucking lightning-3.5mm dongles
They all hope it’ll end years of having to pay employees.
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.
They’re not threatened by its potential. They, like artists, are threatened by management who think that LLMs are good enough today to replace part or all of their staff.
There was a story from earlier this year of a company that owns 12-15 different gaming news outlets who fired about 80% of their writing staff and journalists - replacing 100% of their staff at the majority of the outlets with LLMs and leaving a skeleton crew at the rest.
What you’re seeing isn’t some slant trying to discredit LLMs. It’s the results of management who are using them wrong.