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Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

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

#101

Why do people act like LLMs only hallucinate some of the time?

The best trick the A.I. companies have pulled is getting us to refer to ‘bugs’ as ‘hallucinations.’ It sounds so much more sophisticated.

Ah, my friend

it's not a bug

It's a fundamental feature

These LLMs can produce nothing else but since the bullshit they spew resembles an answer and sometimes accidentally collide with one, people tend to think it can give answers. But no.

https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650

> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.

> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.

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

#103
post #27

"Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all." 100% completely accurate is super-AI-complete. No human can meet that goal either. No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about som…

If I could delivery “80% correct” software for my workplace, my day would be a whole hell of a lot easier.

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

#104
post #27

"Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all." 100% completely accurate is super-AI-complete. No human can meet that goal either. No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about som…

> No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something.

Kahneman has a fantastic book on this called Noise. It’s all about noise in human decision making and how to counteract it.

My favorite example was how even the same expert evaluating the same fingerprints on different occasions (long enough to forget) will find different results.

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

#105

This is analogous to the Apple Maps launch failure. Except that Apple competes to make the best smartphone, and an iPhone was still valuable without Apple Maps. What happens to Google if it stops being able to compete in search?

"Search" isn't Google's product. Google hasn't been a search company for 20 years.

"Ads" is Google's product. And the only way they'll go bankrupt is if 1) companies realize that advertising is pointless (I'm not holding my breath), or 2) some other company takes over from Google, which seems unlikely without government intervention (I'm not holding my breath).

Google is a shit company, but they'll still be around 20 years from now, because our economy is nonsensical and irrational.

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

#106
I am not surprised that AI results are bad. I know they are bad. But that doesn't concern me because I expect it to get better.

What concerns me is that Google would push this trash to the front page. What are they even thinking? Who gave go ahead on this?

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

#107
post #83
post #27

"Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all." 100% completely accurate is super-AI-complete. No human can meet that goal either. No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about som…

I feel like there's some semantic slippage around the meaning of the word "accuracy" here. I grant you, my print Encyclopedia Britannica is not 100% accurate. But the difference between it and a LLM is not just a matter of degree: there's a "chain of custody" to information that just isn't there with a LLM. Philosophers have a working definition of knowledge as being (at least†) "justified true belief." Even if a LLM…

Encyclopedia Britannica is also wrong in a reproducible and fixable way. And the input queries a finite set. It's output does not change due to random or arbitrary things. It is actually possible to verify. LLMs so far seem to be entirely unverifiable.

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

#108
post #95

It's debatable whether Google has truly lost the plot because of the "AI wars", but the moment the statement "Bing returns more sensible results than you" becomes verifiably true, it's... cause for concern? The approach that Google appears to have taken, which is to assume that the top-ranked part of its current search index is a sensible knowledge base, may have been true some years ago, but definitely isn't now: fo…

Oh it gets even better. The public has been hearing about AI this and AI that for over a year, but the existing use cases and deployment was confined to some super special niches like writing or the creative industries and programming. This is the first nation-scale deployment of the technology, running on Google's biggest and most profitable market in one of the most widely used internet services, and it's a shitsho…

Yeah, the most likely take here is that Google's leadership truly did not recognize how utterly awful the quality of their flagship search index had become over the years.

I mean, it explains a lot, but still... you're recruited using industry-leading practices out of an overflowing pool of abundant talent... and this is what you make of it? As the kids say: SMH!

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

#109
post #24
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's not really that bad. I use gemini often and it's great. I prefer their UI

What do you like more about their ui?
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