Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 387 posts

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#31

Post by ADeerAppeared »

pilooch wrote: post #15

So Google hasn't used an LLM to generate and test weird queries ? This is not putting the bar very high for the whole industry... There'd be so much to gain from a clean deployment... Either it hard, either it is a rush. As a machine learnist, I believe it's actually impossible, by design of the autoregressive LLM. This race may we'll be partially to the bottom.

> So Google hasn't used an LLM to generate and test weird queries ?

You don't even need an LLM for that. Google will almost certainly have tested.

The test result is just politically-unacceptable within the company: It doesn't work, it's a architectural issue inherent to the technology, we can't fix it.

Instead, they just rush to patch any specific, individual errors that show up, and claim that these errors are "rare exceptions" or "never happened".

What's going on here is that Google (and most other AI firms) are just trying to gaslight the world about how error-prone AI is, because they're in too deep and can't accept the reality themselves.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#32

Post by arccy »

JCM9 wrote: post #17

The fall of Google’s reputation on ML is nothing short of spectacular. They went from having a near untouchable reputation as being far ahead of any other large tech company on ML to total shambles in a year. Everything they’ve released has been a complete popcorn worthy dumpster fire from faked demos, to racist models that try and pretend white people don’t exist, to this latest nonsense telling me put glue on my pi…

research != product

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#33

Post by CydeWeys »

rvnx wrote: post #23
JCM9 wrote: post #17

The fall of Google’s reputation on ML is nothing short of spectacular. They went from having a near untouchable reputation as being far ahead of any other large tech company on ML to total shambles in a year. Everything they’ve released has been a complete popcorn worthy dumpster fire from faked demos, to racist models that try and pretend white people don’t exist, to this latest nonsense telling me put glue on my pi…

It could be because they actually released something. If you look back, the Google Research blog posts always have grandiose claims, but you can often never use them.

AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Waymo FSD are all released in the sense that you can see them actually working in the real world. Those all took much longer to put together than whatever rushed features were released to catch up with OpenAI, however.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#35

Post by realreality »

ethbr1 wrote: post #12
caesil wrote: post #11

Who knows how many of these are fake. People have been dropping inspect-element-manipulated screenshots all over twitter. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-over... > A correction was made on May 24, 2024: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a Google result from the company’s new artificial-intelligence tool AI Overview. A social media commenter claimed that a result for a…

I'd say the broader issue here is a lack of transparency into results. If Google is sending bad results, who can prove that?

That’s always been an issue. Years ago, researchers demonstrated in an experiment that they could swing public opinion about electoral candidates by manipulating search results. Who knows if Google took that experiment and ran with it?

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#36

Post by [deleted] »

JCM9 wrote: post #17

The fall of Google’s reputation on ML is nothing short of spectacular. They went from having a near untouchable reputation as being far ahead of any other large tech company on ML to total shambles in a year. Everything they’ve released has been a complete popcorn worthy dumpster fire from faked demos, to racist models that try and pretend white people don’t exist, to this latest nonsense telling me put glue on my pi…

[deleted]

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#37

Post by thesimp »

I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on.

Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#38

Post by cjk2 »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #31
pilooch wrote: post #15

So Google hasn't used an LLM to generate and test weird queries ? This is not putting the bar very high for the whole industry... There'd be so much to gain from a clean deployment... Either it hard, either it is a rush. As a machine learnist, I believe it's actually impossible, by design of the autoregressive LLM. This race may we'll be partially to the bottom.

> So Google hasn't used an LLM to generate and test weird queries ? You don't even need an LLM for that. Google will almost certainly have tested. The test result is just politically-unacceptable within the company: It doesn't work, it's a architectural issue inherent to the technology, we can't fix it. Instead, they just rush to patch any specific, individual errors that show up, and claim that these errors are "rar…

They already know it’s a shit show. They are trying to push it along until it’s someone else’s fault.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#39

Post by nicklecompte »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #18
pilooch wrote: post #15

So Google hasn't used an LLM to generate and test weird queries ? This is not putting the bar very high for the whole industry... There'd be so much to gain from a clean deployment... Either it hard, either it is a rush. As a machine learnist, I believe it's actually impossible, by design of the autoregressive LLM. This race may we'll be partially to the bottom.

> So Google hasn't used an LLM to generate and test weird queries ? What about simple manual testing? Seems to have skipped QA completely, automated or not.

There has been a lot of excitement recently about how using lower precision floats only slightly degrades LLM performance. I am wondering if Google took those results at face value to offer a low-cost mass-use transformer LLM, but didn’t test it since according to the benchmarks (lol) the lower precision shouldn’t matter very much.

But there is a more general problem: Big Tech is high on their own supply when it comes to LLMs, and AI generally. Microsoft and Google didn’t fact-check their AI even in high-profile public demos; that strongly suggests they sincerely believed it could answer “simple” factual questions with high reliability. Another example: I don’t think Sundar Pichai was lying when he said Gemini taught itself Sanskrit, I think he was given bad info and didn’t question it because motivated reasoning gives him no incentive to be skeptical.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#40

Post by ethbr1 »

realreality wrote: post #35
ethbr1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the broader issue here is a lack of transparency into results. If Google is sending bad results, who can prove that?

That’s always been an issue. Years ago, researchers demonstrated in an experiment that they could swing public opinion about electoral candidates by manipulating search results. Who knows if Google took that experiment and ran with it?

I mean, that's always been the TikTok argument, to me.

Widely-used platforms that can +/- 1% their algorithms to affect democracy have pretty high burdens of trust/transparency, and we're not close to that with any platform (Chinese or not) that I'm aware of.

Meta's probably the closest, because of scrutiny, but afaik even their transparency isn't sufficient for realtime attestation.

Post reply on HN