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Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

theguardian.com

201–210 of 214 posts

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Kagi is running a multi-step agentic loop there, maybe something like a LangGraph implementation that iterates on the context. That burns a lot of inference tokens and adds latency, which works for a paid subscription but probably destroys the unit economics for Google's free tier. They are likely restricted to single-pass RAG at that scale.

> works for a paid subscription but probably destroys the unit economics for Google's free tier Anyone relying on Google's free tier to attempt any research is getting what they pay for.

> Anyone relying on Google's free tie

Google Scholar is still free

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#202
the real promise of large language models is that before people were looking too closely, datasets had been procured in questionable ways. so then users can have access to medical data based on doctor's emails and word documents on their pc. which would have a lot of value. no it has become a glorified search engine.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing as a keyboard worth buying either. I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the onset.

Well, if the keyboard randomly mistypes 40% of the time like LLMs, that's probably not a worthwhile keyboard.

Depends what you're doing I suppose. E.g. if keyboards had a 40% error rate you wouldn't find me trying to write a novel on one... but you'd still find me using it for a lot of things. I.e. we don't choose to use tools solely based on how often they malfunction, rather stuff like how often they save us time over not using them on average.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we hit peak AI improvement velocity sometime mid last year. The reality is all progress was made using a huge backlog of public data. There will never be 20+ years of authentic data dumped on the web again. I've hoped against but suspected that as time goes on LLMs will become increasingly poisoned by the the well of the closed loop. I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more free data as bitt…

> I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more free data as bitter as it may taste. Mercor, Surge, Scale, and other data labelling firms have shown that's not true. Paid data for LLM training is in higher demand than ever for this exact reason: Model creators want to improve their models, and free data no longer cuts it.

"Paid data," in the sense of cheap text, is a mature industry, and you can have as much as you want for pennies per word.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#205
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every other source for information, including (or maybe especially) human experts can also make mistakes or hallucinate. The reason ppl go to LLMs for medical advice is because real doctors actually fuck up each and everyday. For clear, objective examples look up stories where surgeons leave things inside of patient bodies post op. Here’s one, and there many like it. https://abc13.com/amp/post/hospital-fined-after-su…

[flagged]

Yup make up something I didn't say to take my argument to a logical extreme so you can feel smug.

"totally disregard"

yeah right, that's what I said

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#206
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are false equivalents. If a technology can’t reliably sort out what is a trustworthy source and filter out the rest than it’s not a truth worthy technology. There are tools after all. I should be able to trust a hammer if I use it correctly All this is also missing the other point: this proves that the narrative companies are selling about AI are not based on objective capabilities

The claim here isn't that the technology can't, but that the people using it chose to use it to not. Equivalent to the person with a hammer who chose to smash the 2x4 into pieces instead of driving a nail into it.

The claim here is that it can’t because it want filter its own garbage let alone other garbage.

The narrative being pushed boils down to LLMs and AI systems being seen as reliable. The fact that Google AI can’t even tag YouTube videos as unreliable sources and filter them out of the result set before analysis is telling

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the keyboard randomly mistypes 40% of the time like LLMs, that's probably not a worthwhile keyboard.

Depends what you're doing I suppose. E.g. if keyboards had a 40% error rate you wouldn't find me trying to write a novel on one... but you'd still find me using it for a lot of things. I.e. we don't choose to use tools solely based on how often they malfunction, rather stuff like how often they save us time over not using them on average.

At 40% failure rate, the keyboard would be useless as a keyboard. What would you use it for?! 40% means the backspace, delete key wouldn't work 40% of the time, and even might hit the enter key instead.

Trying to fix the mistakes, would lead to more mistakes! Which I guess is apt, because that sounds a lot like AI.

You could use the keyboard to prop a door open though.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#210
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you're doing I suppose. E.g. if keyboards had a 40% error rate you wouldn't find me trying to write a novel on one... but you'd still find me using it for a lot of things. I.e. we don't choose to use tools solely based on how often they malfunction, rather stuff like how often they save us time over not using them on average.

At 40% failure rate, the keyboard would be useless as a keyboard. What would you use it for?! 40% means the backspace, delete key wouldn't work 40% of the time, and even might hit the enter key instead. Trying to fix the mistakes, would lead to more mistakes! Which I guess is apt, because that sounds a lot like AI. You could use the keyboard to prop a door open though.

Is it 40% failure per individual back/forth or 40% failure per individual letter output? I guess it really just depends how much one wants to bash AI instead of actually talk about failure rate not normally being what makes using a tool worthwhile :D.

I'm not big on AI for much more than additional "Google search" type usage myself so it's interesting to see how polarized folks are that LLMs either have to be the greatest gift from god to take over the world or completely 100% useless trash which couldn't ever be used for anything because the output is not always correct.

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