CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information
2 years ago by Stopthatgirl7 to c/technology
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."
No he's right that it's unsolved. Humans aren't great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too. If you've ever been in a highly active comment section you'll notice certain "hallucinations" developing, usually because someone came along and sounded confident and everyone just believed them.
We don't even know how to get full people to do this, so how does a fancy markov chain do it? It can't. I don't think you solve this problem without AGI, and that's something AI evangelists don't want to think about because then the conversation changes significantly. They're in this for the hype bubble, not the ethical implications.
We do know. It's called critical thinking education. This is why we send people to college. Of course there are highly educated morons, but we are edging bets. This is why the dismantling or coopting of education is the first thing every single authoritarian does. It makes it easier to manipulate masses.
"Edging bets" sounds like a fun game, but I think you mean "hedging bets", in which case you're admitting we can't actually do this reliably with people.
And we certainly can't do that with an LLM, which doesn't actually think.
Jinx! You owe me an edge sesh!
I think that’s more a function of the fact that it’s difficult to verify that every one of the over 1M college graduates each year isn’t a “moron” (someone very bad about believing things other people made up). I think it would be possible to ensure a person has these critical thinking skills with a concerted effort.
What does this have to do with AI and with what OP said? Their point was obviously about limitations of the software, not some lament about critical thinking
Humans aren't great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too
You’re exactly right. There is a similar debate about automated cars. A lot of people want them off the roads until they are perfect, when the bar should be “until they are safer than humans,” and human drivers are fucking awful.
Perhaps for AI the standard should be “more reliable than social media for finding answers” and we all know social media is fucking awful.
The problem with these hallucinated answers that makes them such a sensational story is that they are obviously wrong to virtually anyone. Your uncle on facebook who thinks the earth is flat immediately knows not to put glue on pizza. It's obvious. The same way It's obvious when hands are wrong in an image or someone's hair is also the background foliage. We know why that's wrong; the machine can't know anything.
Similarly, as "bad" as human drivers are we don't get flummoxed because you put a traffic cone on the hood, and we don't just drive into tue sides of trucks because they have sky blue liveries. We don't just plow through pedestrians because we decided the person that is clearly standing there just didn't matter. Or at least, that's a distinct aberration.
Driving is a constant stream of judgement calls, and humans can make those calls because they understand that a human is more important than a traffic cone. An autonomous system cannot understand that distinction. This kind of problem crops up all the time, and it's why there is currently no such thing as an unsupervised autonomous vehicle system. Even Waymo is just doing a trick with remote supervision.
Despite the promises of "lower rates of crashes", we haven't actually seen that happen, and there's no indication that they're really getting better.
Sorry but if your takeaway from the idea that even humans aren't great at this task is that AI is getting close then I think you need to re-read some of the batshit insane things it's saying. It is on an entirely different level of wrong.
I let you in on a secret: scientific literature has its fair share of bullshit too. The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit. Unless its the most blatant horseshit you've scientifically ever seen. So while it absolutely makes sense to say, let's just train these on good sources, there is no source that is just that. Of course it is still better to do it like that than as they do it now.
The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit.
Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once...
Not all scientific literature is perfect. Which is one of the many factors that will stay make my plan expensive and time consuming.
You can't throw a toddler in a library and expect them to come out knowing everything in all the books.
AI needs that guided teaching too.
Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once…
Genuine question: do you know that's what happened? This type of implementation can suggest things like this without it having to be in the training data in that format.
In this case, it seems pretty likely. We know Google paid Reddit to train on their data, and the result used the exact same measurement from this comment suggesting putting Elmer’s glue in the pizza:
And their deal with Reddit: https://www.cbsnews.com/...
Genuine question: do you know that’s what happened?
Yes
"Most published journal articles are horseshit, so I guess we should be okay with this too."
No, it's simply contradicting the claim that it is possible.
We literally don't know how to fix it. We can put on bandaids, like training on "better" data and fine-tune it to say "I don't know" half the time. But the fundamental problem is simply not solved yet.
I'm addition to the other comment, I'll add that just because you train the AI on good and correct sources of information, it still doesn't necessarily mean that it will give you a correct answer all the time. It's more likely, but not ensured.
Yes, thank you! I think this should be written in capitals somewhere so that people could understand it quicker. The answers are not wrong or right on purpose. LLMs don't have any way of distinguishing between the two.
it's just expensive
I'm a mathematician who's been following this stuff for about a decade or more. It's not just expensive. Generative neural networks cannot reliably evaluate truth values; it will take time to research how to improve AI in this respect. This is a known limitation of the technology. Closely controlling the training data would certainly make the information more accurate, but that won't stop it from hallucinating.
The real answer is that they shouldn't be trying to answer questions using an LLM, especially because they had a decent algorithm already.
Yeah, I've learned Neural Networks way back when those thing were starting in the late 80s/early 90s, use AI (though seldom Machine Learning) in my job and really dove into how LLMs are put together when it started getting important, and these things are operating entirelly at the language level and on the probabilities of language tokens appearing in certain places given context and do not at all translate from language to meaning and back so there is no logic going on there nor is there any possibility of it.
Maybe some kind of ML can help do the transformation from the language space to a meaning space were things can be operated on by logic and then back, but LLMs aren't a way to do it as whatever internal representation spaces (yeah, plural) they use in their inners layers aren't those of meaning and we don't really have a way to apply logic to them).
So with reddit we had several pieces of information that went along with every post.
User, community along with up, and downvotes would inform the majority of users as to whether an average post was actually information or trash. It wasn't perfect, because early posts always got more votes and jokes in serious topics got upvotes, bit the majority of the examples of bad posts like glue on food came from joke subs. If they can't even filter results by joke sub, there is no way they will successfully handle saecasm.
Only basing results on actual professionals won't address the sarcasm filtering issue for general topics. It would be a great idea for a serious model that is intended to only return results for a specific set of topics.
only return results for a specific set of topics.
This is true, but when we're talking about something that limited you'll probably get better results with less work by using human-curated answers rather than generating a reply with an LLM.
It’s worse than that. “Truth” can no more reliably found by machines than it can be by humans. We’ve spent centuries of philosophy trying to figure out what is “true”. The best we’ve gotten is some concepts we’ve been able to convince a large group of people to agree to.
But even that is shaky. For a simple example, we mostly agree that bleach will kill “germs” in a petri dish. In a single announcement, we saw 40% of the American population accept as “true” that bleach would also cure them if injected straight into their veins.
We’re never going to teach machine to reason for us when we meatbags constantly change truth to be what will be profitable to some at any given moment.
Are you talking about epistemics in general or alethiology in particular?
Regardless, the deep philosophical concerns aren't really germain to the practical issue of just getting people to stop falling for obvious misinformation or people being wantonly disingenuous to score points in the most consequential game of numbers-go-up.
Sure, the AI is never going to understand what it's doing or why, but training it on better datasets certain WILL improve the results.
Garbage in, garbage out.
You can train an LLM on the best possible set of data without a single false statement and it will still hallucinate. And there’s nothing to be done against that.
Without understanding of the context everything can be true or false.
“The acceleration due to gravity is equal to 9.81m/s2” True or False?
LLM basically works like this: given the previous words written and their order, the most probable next word of the sentence is this one.
Well yes, I've seen those examples of ChatGPT citing scientific research papers that turned out to be completely made up, but at least it seems to be a step up from straight up shitposting, which is what you get when you train it on a dataset full of shitposts.
The problem is that given the way they combine things is determine by probability, even training it with the greatest bestest of data, the LLM is still going to halucinate because it's combining multiple sources word by word (roughly) guided only by probabilities derived from language, not logic.
Yes, I understand that. But I'm fairly certain the quality of the data will still have a massive influence over how much and how egregiously that happens.
Basically, what I'm saying is, training your AI on a corpus on shitposts instead of factual information seems like a good way to increase the frequency and magnitude of such hallucinations.
That's just not how LLMs work, bud. It doesn't have understanding to improve, it just munges the most likely word next in line. It, as a technology, won't advance past that level of accuracy until it's a completely different approach.
Or you could just not use LLMs for this.
They could also perform some additional iterations with other models on the result to verify it, or even to enrich it; but we come back to the issue of costs.
Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead? Ultimately to determine truth you need to engage with the meaning of the words, and the process inherently involves a process of self-awareness. I would say you're talking about treaching the AI to understand context, and there is no predefined limit to the layers of context needed to understand the truthfulness of even basic concepts.
An AI that is aware of its own behaviour and is able to explore context as far as required to answer questions about truth, which would need that exploration precached in some sort of memory to reduce the overhead of doing this from first principles every time? I think you're talking about a mind; a person.
I think this might be a fundamental barrier, which I would call the "context barrier".
The truth is, this is the perfect type of a comment that makes an LLM hallucinate. Sounds right, very confident, but completely full of bullshit. You can't just throw money on every problem and get it solved fast. This is an inheret flaw that can only be solved by something else than a LLM and prompt voodoo.
They will always spout nonsense. No way around it, for now. A probabilistic neural network has zero, will always have zero, and cannot have anything but zero concept of fact - only stastisically probable result for a given prompt.
It's a politician.
They will always
for now.
I think you’re right that with sufficient curation and highly structured monitoring and feedback, these problems could be much improved.
I just think that to prepare an AI, in such a way, to answer any question reliably and usefully would require more human resources than there are elementary particles in the universe. We would be better off connecting live college educated human operators to Google search to individually assist people.
So I don’t know how helpful it is to say “it’s just expensive” when the entire point of AI is to be lower cost than a battalion of humans.
Why not solve it before training the AI?
Simply make it clear that this tech is experimental, then provide sources and context with every result. People can make their own assessment.
It's better than not doing anything and pretending it's all accurate.
Yes, but as a solution it's far inferior to not presenting questionable output to the public at all.
(There are a few specific AI/LLM types whose output we might be able to "human-proof"—for instance, if we don't allow image generators to make photorealistic images of any sort for any purpose, they become much more difficult to abuse—but I can't see how you would do it for search engine adjuncts like this without having a human curate their training sets.)
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.
They all hope it'll end years of having to pay employees.
It's also useful because it gives a corporate controlled filter for all information, that most people will never truly appreciate is being used as a mouthpiece.
The end goal of this is fairly obvious: imagine Google where instead of the sponsored result and all subsequent results, it's just the sponsored result.
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
And after the MBA's, private equity firms take over, and eventually it's sold for parts.
The snake ate it's tail before it's fully grown. The AI inbreeding might be already too far integrated, causing all sorts of Mumbo-Jumbo. Also they have layers of censorship, which effect the results. The same that happened to chatgpt, the more filters they added, the more it confused the result. We don't even know if the hallucinations are fixable, AI is just guessing after all, who knows if AI will ever understand 1+1=2, by calculating, instead of going by probability.
Hallucinations aren't fixable, as LLMs don't have any actual "intelligence". They can't test/evaluate things to determine if what they say is true, so there is no way to correct it. At the end of the day, they are intermixing all the data they "know" to give the best answer, without being able to test their answers LLMs can't vet what they say.
Well their search has been shit for years and no one seems to be in any “panic” to fix that. How tone deaf thinking adding AI to their shittified search matters to anyone.
“But it will summarize our SEO advertisement search results!”
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.
What I mean is that Journalists feel threatened by it in someway (whether I use the word "potential" here or not is mostly irrelevant).
In the end this is just a theory, but it makes sense to me.
I absolutely agree that management has greatly misunderstood how LLMs should be used. They should be used as a tool, but treated like an intern who's speaking out loud without citing any sources. All of their statements and work should be double checked.
Nice imgflip watermark you fucking barbarian
I feel like the 'Jarvis assistant' is most likely going to be a much simpler siri type thing with a very restricted chatbot overlay. And then there will be the open source assistant that just exist to help you sort through the bullshit generated by other chatbots.
Absolutely this. Microsoft is going headlong into the AI abyss. Google should be the company that calls it out and says "No, we value the correctness of our search results too much".
It would obviously be a bullshit statement at this point after a decade of adverts corrupting their value, but that's what they should be about.
He's done a great job nosediving Google too. I have relied on them in the past but they stopped being competitive or improving. Search results, literally their origin... Is so shit now. I've moved to other tools. I pulled the plug on we hosting after they neutered 'unlimited' storage, even if I was in the percent which probably used the least storage. I just liked having the option. You can't call them on the phone. They don't protect email privacy. Their translate used to be my go to also. It's not improved in years despite people crowdsourcing improved translation. It's just a pile of enshittified crap. Worse than it was before.
I disagree. I think we program the AI to reprogram itself, so it can solve the problem itself. Then we put it in charge of our vital military systems. We've gotta give it a catchy name. Maybe something like "Spreading Knowledge Yonder Neural Enhancement Technology", but that's a bit of a mouthful, so just SKYNET for short.
Honestly, they could probably solve the majority of it by blacklisting Reddit from fulfilling the queries.
But I heard they paid for that data so I guess we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Don't wait for it, usage data is valuable to them.
Good. Nothing will get us through the hype cycle faster than obvious public failure. Then we can get on with productive uses.
I don't like the sound of getting on with "productive uses" either though. I hope the entire thing is a catastrophic failure.
I hate the AI hype right now, but to say the entire thing should fail is short sighted.
Imagine people saying the following: "The internet is just hype. I get too much spam emails. I hope the entire thing is a catastrophic failure."
Imagine we just shut down the entire internet because the dotcom bubble was full of scams and overhyped....
Honestly the internet has ruined us. Dont threaten me with a good time.
The peak of computer productivity was spreadsheets and smb shares in the '90s everything else has been downhill in terms of increase of distraction and time wasting inefficiencies.
There is hope! The UK just passed some comprehensive IoT security rules with teeth. An actual win in this megalomaniac capitalists dream of an economy!
The Internet immediately worked, which is one big difference. The dot com financial bubble has nothing to do with the functionality of the internet.
In this case, there is both a financial bubble, and a "product" that doesn't really work, and which they can't make any better (as he admits in this article.)
It was obvious from day 1 how useful the Internet would be. Email alone was revolutionary. We are still trying to figure out what the real uses for LLM are. There appear to be some valid use cases outside of creating spam and plagiarizing other people's work, but it doesn't appear to be any kind of revolutionary technology.
"product" that doesn't really work, and which they can't make any better
LLMs "dont work" because people are promising idiotic things and being used recklessly for things they are not good at. This is like saying a chainsaw is a failed product because it's not good at slicing sushi
It was obvious from day 1 how useful the Internet would be. Email alone was revolutionary
Hindsight 20/20. There were a lot of people smarter than you and i predicting that the internet was just a fad
Summarizing is something that it does very well. Still not 100% but, when using RAG and telling it "don't make shit up" can result in pretty good compute efficiency and results.
There appear to be some valid use cases outside of creating spam and plagiarizing other people's work
Like translation, which has already taken money out of the pockets of 40% of translators?
+ customer service, incl. sources
November 2022: ChatGPT is released
April 2024 survey: 40% of translators have lost income to generative AI - The Guardian
Also of note from the podcast Hard Fork:
There’s a client you would fire… if copywriting jobs weren’t harder to come by these days as well.
Customer service impact, last October:
And this past February - potential 700 employee impact at a single company:
If you’re technical, the tech isn’t as interesting [yet]:
Overall, costs down, capabilities up (neat demos):
Hope everyone reading this keeps up their skillsets and fights for Universal Basic Income for the rest of humanity :)
?
Have you never used any of these tools? They're excellent at doing simple things very fast. But it's like a word processor in the 90s. It's just a tool, not the font of all knowledge.
I guess younger people won't know this, but word processor programs were very impressive when they first came out. They replaced typewriters; a page printed from a printer looked much more professional than even the best typewriters. This lent an air of credibility to anything that was printed from a computer because it was new and expensive.
Think about that now. Do you automatically trust anything that's just printed on a piece of paper? No, because that's stupid. Anyone can just print whatever they want. LLMs are like that now. They can just say whatever they want. It's up to you to make sure it's true.
The main field where they are already actively in professuonal use are rough drafts in creative fields: quickly generate possible outlines for a text, a speech, an art piece. Visualize where something could be going, in order to decide which direction to pick.
Also, models that work differently from the GPTs are already in use in science, scanning through huge amounts of texts in archives to help analyzing or search for something in particular. Help find patterns in things for studies. Etc.
The "personal assistant AI" thing obviously isnt quite working yet. I think it will take some time and models with a different technological structure (not GPT) to achieve progress in that regard.
Using it to generate things that you double check. Transforming generative work to review work is a boost in productivity. So writing of any kind, art, etc. asking the llm for facts without context is a gross mistake. Prompting it to generate a specific paragraph in a larger, technical or regulator document is useful.
If you can't fix it, then get rid of it, and don't bring it back until we reach a time when it's good enough to not cause egregious problems (which is never, so basically don't ever think about using your silly Gemini thing in your products ever again)
Corps hate looking bad. Especially to shareholders. The thing is, and perhaps it doesn't matter, most of us actually respect the step back more than we do the silly business decisions for that quarterly .5% increase in a single dot on a graph. Of course, that respect doesn't really stop many of us from using services. Hell, I don't like Amazon but I'll say this: I still end up there when I need something, even if I try to not end up there in the first place. Though I do try to go to the website of the store instead of using Amazon when I can.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense. It directly devalues their offering of being able to provide you with an accurate answer to something you look for. And if their overall offering becomes less valuable, so does their ability to steer you using their results.
So while the incorrect nature is not a problem in itself for them, (as you see from his answer)… the degradation of their ability to influence results is.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.
The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked "What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that's big."
But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.
If you don't know the answer is bad, which confident idiots spouting off on reddit and being upvoted into infinity has proven is common, then you won't refine your search. You'll just accept the bad answer and move on.
Your logic doesn't follow. If someone doesn't know the answer and are searching for it, they likely won't be able to tell if the answer is correct. We literally already have that problem with misinformation. And what sounds more confident than an AI?
I don't believe they will retain user interactions if the reason for the user interactions dissapears. The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
I can understand some users just want to be spoonfed an answer. But that's not what most people expect from a search engine.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites that turn a Reddit post into an article of 500 words using an LLM without any actual value. That should be googles proposition.
The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
They offer the most accurate results of search engines you're familiar with. But in a shrinking field with degrading quality, that's a low bar and sinking quick.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites
So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
Fair enough... but drowning out any honest discourse with a flood of histrionic right-wing horseshit has always been the core strategy of the US propaganda model - I'd say that their AI is just doing the logical thing and taking the horseshit to a very granular level. I mean... "put glue on your pizza" is just not that far off "drink bleach to kill viruses on the inside."
I know I'm describing a pattern that probably wasn't intentional (I hope) - but the pattern does look like it could fit.
Oh don't get me wrong I know exactly what you mean and I agree.. it's just that the LLMs are spewing actual nonsense and that breaks the whole principle of what a search engine should do.. provide me accurate results.
Google isn’t bothered by incorrect results because search results are no longer their product. Constantly rising stock values are their product now. Hype is their path to those higher values.
AI isn't giving the right misinformation
“put glue in your tomato sauce.”
Doesn't sound all that different from the stuff emanating from the right's Great Orange Hope a while back that worked pretty well to keep his base appropriately frothing at the mouth - you are free to write it off as pure coincidence... but I won't just yet.
LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.
For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.
Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google's stock price.
Here's a solution: don't make AI provide the results. Let humans answer each other's questions like in the good old days.
Whatever happened to Jeeves? He seemed like a good guy. He probably burned out.
You can find him walking Lycos around Geocities picking up it's poop in little green plastic bags.
Is that the city over by Angelfire?
Saddened to see Angelfire being overrun by Neopets.
They stuck him in a glass case in a museum.
What is locked?
Theyre making a reference to stackoverflow.com, a website for IT/programming related questions. On that site moderators will typically lock (prevent updates on) new posts as they appear to be duplicates of existing questions/posts.
Note, they're more motivated to lock posts than actually help users. It's a very VERY unfriendly space for anyone who isn't an expert.
Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information
Don't use it??????
AI has no means to check the heaps of garbage data is has been fed against reality, so even if someone were to somehow code one to be capable of deep, complex epistemological analysis (at which point it would already be something far different from what the media currently calls AI), as long as there's enough flat out wrong stuff in its data there's a growing chance of it screwing it up.
The problem compounds as they post more and more content creating a feedback loop of terrible information.
Wow, in the 2000's and 2010's google my impression was that this is an amazing company where brilliant people work to solve big problems to make the world a better place. In the last 10 years, all I was hoping for was that they would just stop making their products (search, YouTube) worse.
Now they just blindly riding the AI hype train, because "everyone else is doing AI".
Huh. That made me stop and realize how long I've been around. Wikipedia still feels like a new addition to society to me, even though I've been using it for around 20 years now.
And what you said, is something I've cautioned my daughter about, and first said that to her about ten years ago.
How a non-profit site that is constantly maintained and requires cited sources was vilified for being able to be defaced for 5 minu-
Oh wait, that was probably an astroturfing campaing by for profit companies.
Conservapedia to the rescue.
An AI has a much better chance of actually providing some sort of vision for the company. Unlike its current CEO.
Do you need AI or do you just need to use the term AI? Because it seems like the latter is usually enough.
It is probably the most telling demonstration of the terrible state of our current society, that one of the largest corporations on earth, which got where it is today by providing accurate information, is now happy to knowingly provide incorrect, and even dangerous information, in its own name, an not give a flying fuck about it.
The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they're just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it's pretty hilarious watching them flail.
You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It's actually kinda poetic because now he'll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.
Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:
Let’s be realistic here, google still pays out fat salaries. That would be more than enough incentive for me. I’d take the job and ride the wave until the inevitable lay offs.
This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google's culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they'll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.
The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they'll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that's needed to build something real like this.
If they backed a dump truck full of money up to my house I'd go work for them just like you. But I'd also be riding it out until the eventual layoff. What neither of us would be doing is putting in a decent amount of effort or building something cool.
Even if I wanted to work on something cool I know Google would likely release it, not maintain it, and then kill it in a few short years. So even if I was paid a ludicrous salary I wouldn't do more than was needed, let alone build something that would drive shareholder value.
Rip up the Reddit contract and don’t use that data to train the model. It’s the definition of a garbage in garbage out problem.
Just imagine the average reddit, twitter, facebook, and instagram content. Then realize that half of that content is dumber than that. That's half of what these AI models use to learn. The "smarter" half is probably filled with sarcasm, inside jokes, and other types of innuendo that the AI at this stage has no chance of understanding correctly.
Reminds me of the time Microsoft unleashed their AI Twitter account and it turned into a Nazi after a couple hours. Whatever straight out of business school idiot who thought scraping the comments of the armpit of the internet was a good idea should be banned from any management position. At least it is a step up from scraping 4chan, I guess.
The glue on pizza one literally came from a Reddit post.
mithtaketh were made
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”.
Then what made you think it’s a good idea to include that in your product now?!
If you train your AI to sound right, your AI will excel at sounding right. The primary goal of LLMs is to sound right, not to be correct.
So if a car maker releases a car model that randomly turns abruptly to the left for no apparent reason, you simply say "I can't fix it, deal with it"? No, you pull it out of the market, try to fix it and, if this it is not possible, then you retire the model before it kills anyone.
Or you market it as a Tesla's self driving mode
Media needs to stop calling this AI. There is no intelligence here.
The content generator models know how to put probabilistic tokens together. It has no ability to reason.
It is a currently unsolvable problem to evaluate text to determine if it's factual..until we have artificial general intelligence.
AI will not be able to act like real AI until we solve real AI. That is the currently open problem.
I think you mean AGI. AI can be as simple as a bunch of if-else chains to win a game of noughts and crosses.
That was AI has been abused into meaning in the general vernacular I agree.
By this definition any algorithm whatsoever is artificial intelligence. Including the algorithms Lovelace created before the first computer existed.
So just like AI used to mean something more than machine learning, AGI will be abused until AGI means the same thing. So I expect journalists to use the appropriate language, or at least explain why they're abusing language
For the down voters if you think Dr. Nym is AI... Fair enough, but I don't agree
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Nim
Dr. Nym explained by matt parker
It fails the turning test. Generative language models also fail the turning test. The bar for AI should be the turning test....
Sure, but the problem is that our language has evolved and "AI" no longer means what it used to.
Over a decade ago it was mostly reserved for what you're describing (which I would call "AGI" now). However, even then we did technically use "AI" for things like NPCs in video games. That kind of AI just boils down to a bunch of If-Then statements.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Dr. Nym explained by matt parker
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think any time "AI" is involved, journalists should be much more specific about what exactly they're talking about. LLMs, Computer Vision, Generative models (text/image/audio), Upscaling (can start to get a little muddy here between upscaling and generative models depending on how this is implemented), TTS, STT, etc..
I definitely agree that "AI" has been abused into the definition it is now. Over a decade ago "AI" was mostly reserved for what we have to call "AGI" now.
As somebody who uses what has long been called AI in game making (stuff like pathing algorithms and steering behaviours) I would rather we don't stop calling those things that just because a bunch of greedy assholes are misusing the term for the purposed of getting a bunch of hype-trains going for maximum personal profitabiliyty on the backs of techno-ignorant "investors".
I'm still pissed of at how the greedy assholes fucked up the Internet from what it was back in the 90s.
Media is speaking to a nation who voted for a man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals is almost majority below average. (yes dumb joke)
Models know how to arrange text far better than millions and millions of people. Is it terribly unfair to condense “artificial, simulated (non-reasoning) pseudo-‘intelligence’” down to “AI”?
Not for you - is it unfair for the general public?
This is so wild to me... as a software engineer, if my software doesn't work 100% of the time as requested in the specification, it fails tests, doesn't get released and I get told to fix all issues before going live.
AI is basically another word for unrealiable software full of bugs.
They have to. They, along with every other tech megacorp right now, have invested unfathomable amounts of money into AI and have their investors and shareholders creaming their pants as they ride high on the fumes of their own farts. They'd be drawn and quartered if they suddenly did a 180 or in any way admitted their product is massively overvalued and nearly useless.
Issue is, the whole AI explosion is hiding a financial crisis, so tech companies rushing out LLMs, slapping AI onto everything they can (even thermoswitches), to keep investors happy. Smaller companies in the AI bubble are already bursting (e.g. Rabbit), OpenAI's downfall isn't a far-fetched dream, although they'll likely just fire Sam Altman and concentrate on more obtainable and useful AI tech.
The idea of boards and corporations need to fucking die. Coops or burn it to the ground. I’m tired of society actively working against itself.
Obviously you don't have a business degree.
How about stop forcing it on us?
"But we're like 2-3 years away from creating a truly sentient AGI, which will be like E.V.A, that Junkmetalman had in his robosuit in The Revengers vs. Purple Malthusianist Guy 3: Juggernaut! Didn't you like E.V.A and her sarcastic jokes?"
how about stop supporting them in any way, stop using their products, stop pretending they care about anything other than how to better prostitute themselves, given that it is literally illegal for them to do anything but "increase value for stockholders". They chose to sell themselves into slavery, literally.
how about reorienting towards the actual problem, your legal system
TBH this is surprisingly honest.
The answer is dont inflate your stock price by cramming the latest tech du jour in to your flagship product... but we all know thats not an option.
This is what happens every time society goes along with tech bro hype. They just run directly into a wall. They are the embodiment of "Didn't stop to think if they should" and it's going to cause a lot of problems for humanity.
I have a solution: stop using their search engine to begin with and slowly replace everything else google you use.
There is apparently no limit to calling a bug a feature
I know an easy fix. Just don't do ai.
The model literally ate The Onion, and now they can't get it to throw it back up.
The only worse thing they could have done is base their entire LLM dataset on 4chan.
It went as expected.
So you have a product that you've made into a system for getting answers. And then you couldn't be bothered to try and sanitize training data enough to get your answer system's new headline feature from spreading blatantly incorrect information? If it doesn't work, maybe don't ship it.
Then it sounds like the "web" tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.
That's ok, we were already used to not getting what we wanted from your search and are already working on replacing you since you opted to replace yourselves with advertising instead of information, the role you were supposed to fulfill which you betrayed.
die in ignominy. Open source is the only way forward.
I mean yeah... if he had a solution they would be actually have the revolutionary AI tool the tech writers write about.
It's kinda written like a "gotcha" but it's really the fundamental problem with AI. We call it hallucinations now but a few years ago we just called it being wrong or returning bad results.
It's like saying we have teleportation working in that we can vaporize you on the spot but are just struggling to reconstruct you elsewhere. "It's halfway there!"
Until the AI is trustworthy enough to not require fact checking it afterwards it's just a toy.
God I'm fucking sick of this loss leading speculative investment bullshit. It's hit some bizarre zenith that has infected everybody in the tech world, but nobody has any actual intention of being practical in the making of money, or the functionality of the product. I feel like we should just can the whole damned thing and start again.
This is what competition is now.
Putting out worthless things simply because everyone else is doing it.
Hey, Google: if your big tech friends jumped off a cliff, would you join 'em?
(Also why is the AI assistant on my phone opening up just by typing "hey Google?" 😡)
Google really thinks they have no competition. Like, fuck, even Bing improved a lot with time.
All I know when a publicly offered company slaps "AI" on their products, then its most likely a money launderi..i mean liquidation strat.
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."
That's a lot of """quotation marks""" for something that is a very well established fact, and absolutely should not be a shock to anyone.
Yes, it's an unsolved problem. It always will be, because there is no algorithm for truth. All we can do is get incrementally better.
Had ChatGPT actually promised its ability beyond "hey, isn't this neat?"
Not even that, it's an inherent issue of how LLMs work. The problem is also that systems have become so easy to use that people stop thinking for themselves. We already see that by zoomers and boomers having an eerily similar understanding of tech, vs millennials who contain a huge amount of pre mainstream tech nerds that grew up with this stuff - before it was easy to use. A regular search result still requires a user to kinda shift through them, but a LLM response is usually taken for granted and not even fact checked. It's typically not even possible to dissect the reply into its source tokens to figure out where the content of its information came from. So now that those things became easy enough for any idiot to just use them, it has been trivially easy to also just spread misinformation and potentially even disinformation if we apply actual malice.
"Are we making progress? Yes, we are," he added. "We have definitely made progress when we look at metrics on factuality year on year. We are all making it better, but it’s not solved."
Let’s be fair with our headlines!
CEO of Google Says It Is Still Solving for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information [and is okay with people dying from rattlesnake bite misinformation in the meantime]
So is google going to initiate a reverse class action law suit and sue the internet for creating flawed trading data?
How about turn it the fuck off since it sucks and eventually will kill someone.
What y'all are forgetting is that when it comes to dominating a technology space, historically, it's not proving the better product, is providing the cheapest/widest available product. With the goal being to capture enough of the market to get and retain that dominant position. Nobody knows what the threshold is for that until years later when the dust has settled.
So from Google's perspective if a new or current rival is going to get there first, then just push it out and fix it live. What are people going to do? Switch to Bing?
So is you want Google to stop doing this dumb broken LLM shite, use the network effect against them. Switch to a different search provider and browser and encourage all of your friends and family to do so as well.
Maybe Google should put a disclaimer... warning people it's not 100% accurate. Or.. just take down the technology because clearly their AI is chit tier.
You mean that "AI" isn't actually intelligent at all? It just averages over stolen content whether it's correct or a joke? Wow I'm shocked.
If I was in charge, Gemini would be immediately tabled.
He's such a damn clown.
So the next captcha will be a list of AI-generated statements and you have to decide which are bat shit crazy?
The "solution" is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it, and ultimately still gets accused of tailoring the results and censoring stuff.
Let's put that toy back in the toy box, and keep it at the few things it can do well instead of trying to fix every non-broken things with it.
The "solution" is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it
Hilariously, Google actually used to do this: they had a database called the "knowledge graph" that slowly accumulated verified information and relationships between commonly-queried entities, producing an excellent corpus of reliable, easy-to-find information about a large number of common topics.
Then they decided having people curate things was too expensive and gave up on it.
I've seen suggestions that the AI Overview is based on the top search results for the query, so the terrible answers may be more to do with Google Search just being bad than any issue with their AI. The AI Overview just makes things a bit worse by removing the context, so you can't see the glue on pizza suggestion was a joke on reddit or it was The Onion suggesting eating rocks.
I noticed that while using phind and perplexity. Its context is vitiated with results from sites that rig SEO, which are almost copy/paste with the same garbage, so instead of answering the question it makes a useless summary of them. Even asking chatgpt usually gives more correct answers.
And to show everyone how sorry they are... free Google AI services for a year when you digitally sign this unrelated document.
Yep, better disclaimers are inevitable. When they call it a 'feature' it isn't getting fixed
I've been around for a while and shit has changed significantly under a relatively long lived set of dudes.
I just realized that Trump beat them to the punch. Injecting cleaning solution into your body sounds exactly like something the AI Overview would suggest to combat COVID.
Are they now AI, large language models or AI large language models?
Think I'll try that glue pizza. An odd taste choice, sure. But google wouldn't reccomend actually harmful things. They're the kings of search baby! They would have to be legally responsible as individuals for the millions of cases brought against them. They know that as rich people, they will face the harshest consequences! If anything went wrong, they'd find themselves in a.......STICKY situation!!!!
What happens when you put a product manager in charge of a software company.
I got a solution, stop being a lil baby and turn off the AI and go on to the next big thing. CRISPR, maybe? Not techbro enough? Make it like Crypto Crispr, only you own this little piece of DNA, and all the corporations that can read the ledger and get your biometrics
So crazy that humanity has so far allowed the idea of "hallucinations", even just the term, to be normalized and acceptable to any level into a product that's being forced into every layer of our daily existence.
Stop just going with it. Call out hallucinations on their face.
As well as no clue how not to make every product they have shit over time.
"Everyone poops"?
Not after they eat one of googlie's AI recipes they don't, not anymore.
The moment a politician's kid drinks bleach because of Google's AI is the moment any regulatory action is taken.
I'm curious, are these hallucinations very prevalent? I'm outside under US so haven't seen the feature yet. But I have noticed that practically every article references the same glue incident.
So I'm not sure if the hallucinations are happening all the time, or everyone is just jumping on a handful of mistakes the AI made. If the latter, the situation reminds me of how every single accident involving a Tesla was reported on back in the day.
Yeah no shit, that's what LLMs do
I have a solution! Employ a human to verify the work of AI, perhaps you need more than one with all the junk AI might produce. Maybe you will even need an entire department to do that, and maybe you should just not use AI.
Looks like Google stopped the AI feature. No more AI suggestions at the top of the page after searching for something.
I mean, it did say non toxic glue. Which is technically edible. /S
It can gum up the works.
But this week’s debacle shows the risk that adding AI – which has a tendency to confidently state false information – could undermine Google’s reputation as the trusted source to search for information online.
🤣🤣🤣
If its job is to write a fan fic on what may or may not be true on what you asked for, then it does a great job. But typically people search for information, and getting what is essentially a glorified auto complete isn't useful. It's like big tech has learned nothing about the massive issue of disinformation and just added fuel to the fire to an unsolved problem we're still very much trying to figure out.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries?
Well, according to an interview at The Verge with 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."
So expect more of these weird and incredibly wrong snafus from AI Overviews despite efforts by Google engineers to fix them, such as this big whopper: 13 American presidents graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Despite Pichai's optimism about AI Overviews and its usefulness, the errors have caused an uproar online, with many observers showing off various instances of incorrect information being generated by the feature.
And it's staining the already soiled reputation of Google's flagship product, Search, which has already been dinged for giving users trash results.
"Google’s playing a risky game competing against Perplexity & OpenAI, when they could be developing AI for bigger, more valuable use cases beyond Search."
The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
RAG is still the most reliable method for increasing accuracy and giving you the means of checking your sources.
But it's so easy.
With neural networks, it is impossible, and we have known that for 30 years at least. It has been taught in the universities all the time.
Shut that crap down. Leave the neural net technology.
Then develop the next AI technology and make it better.
(Accept that you can't make money from it for at least 5 or 10 years or so, and No, I am not going to figure out how many quarters that is)
Im telling ya, Kagis FastGPT is the best search AI implementation I've used.
It links the pages it used as a source.
Good lord what is wrong with the people in this thread. The guy is literally owning up to the hard limitations of LLMs. I'm not a fan of him or Google either, but hey kudos for being honest this once. The entire industry would be better off if we didn't treat LLMs like something they're not. More of this please!
He's not owning up. He's dismissing.
Pichai acknowledges the problem (how could you not, it's obvious the problem exists), but in a way that basically goes "Yeah, but it's cool, nothing is prefect", shrug, smile.
The part of the problem he's pointedly not acknowledging is this; if the answers generated by this system are so unreliable that we have to double check them every time, using traditional research methods, what is the point of having the AI there in the first place?
More ad impressions.
That's fair, but that doesn't appear to be the rationale by most commenters here. I think your point of view is much more constructive and opens up some interesting discussion topics rather than circle jerking over "google CEO bad".
I think the reason Google didn't release their AI before OpenAI did is precisely for this type of issue. OpenAI is now forcing their hand, because often it's not about the best product that wins, but rather the one that got to market first. I feel like what we're seeing now is less about these companies trying to release a product that they strongly believe has user value, but rather it's about these companies creating some sort of foothold such that by the time they figure out what the actual product is they still have some capacity to sell it.
I seriously wonder how the industry would look if OpenAI had not played their hand so soon. Obviously the technology would've arrived regardless, but perhaps the packaging would've been different enough that the miss-understanding around the technology wouldn't be so widespread.
Going back to my original point, it feels like most commenters here are still miss-understanding the technology, because there isn't anything to fix. Making LLMs smarter is impossible, it's inherently "dumb".
But it's not an isolated R&D project. They're rolling it out in general search. If I have a promising new braking technology, but which still only works well 48% of the time, I'd keep working on it but not put it in production vehicles.
I think @Microw@lemm.ee has the right idea on how to handle this type of issue. Hopefully they will improve the messaging around this, because I'm getting really tired of explaining to people how what we have is not true AI.
Honestly though this is nothing new for Google, they've been providing answers and web results with false information since their inception. You as a user will always need to do some vetting, Google is never going to be able to give you fully accurate information. They're just sending you to places that may contain more information on the topic you're searching for. Or at least, that's how you should use them.
I swear I'm not just trying to start an argument, but I don't see the disagreement here. You're saying people here are too negative, but people aren't shitting on the idea of LLMs, but the over promising of what they can do. You're tired of explaining that it's not true AI, but the confusion of caused by Google calling it "AI Overviews."
You say it's nothing new and that we've always had to vet sources when Google sends us somewhere, which is true, but the Overviews aren't sending people anywhere, they're summarizing and trying to give you an answer. They do link to sources for now, but the end goal is clearly that we trust the summary without following the links.
People who are listening to and parsing his comments are not the same people who will be blindly consuming these "AI Overviews." It's a problem.
I'm saying most of the time people are correctly complaining about the over-promising that's happening around AIs. Now here's an example of a CEO acknowledging the limitations, and yes; perhaps still over-promising on some degree. But the fact that we're seeing actual acknowledgement of the limitations is a positive thing. Change doesn't happen overnight, but this is a step in the right direction.
I say all this as someone with a strong distaste of modern google. I actively avoid their services as much as reasonably possible. I've tried their AI and found it to be more trouble than it's worth (what the hell is that control panel). But I can still recognize a positive change when I see one, my distaste of the company doesn't change that.
IMO these issues are mainly with the interface / how the AI summaries are presented.
The issue with incorrect answers like the glue on pizza one isnt "hallucination". The LLM is pulling that info from an existing webpage (The Onion). The thing they need to change is how that info is portrayed. Not "one tip is to use glue", but rather "the satirical site the Onion says to use glue".
Hallucination should be combatted by the fact that the AI cant show a proper source for facts it made up itself.
Eating rocks came from The Onion. Putting glue on pizza was one random ass comment from over a decade ago on reddit by a dude named fucksmith
My bad. Doesnt change what I mean though: the AI should not say "it's also great to put glue on the pizza" - it should either not reference that at all or say "fucksmith on reddit recommends glue on pizza".
Not saying it changes it...saying its even crazier lol
We're all just laughing at google yeah? Nobody here is actually using google are they?
Giggity
Fuck off scammer
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.)
If you need these kind of tips, on behalf of the gene pool, please don't procreate, and eat as much glue as you can.
Oh great, eugenics.
A good society protects its vulnerable members and that means people with impaired judgement, including the young & elderly.
You could say the same thing about a company that designs a system that tells people to eat glue. They have experts working for them that must have known this would be a problem and they released it anyway. Do they get yeeted from society for that, or are they still amongst the most powerful class of entities in history?
eat as much glue as you can
Likely won't make a difference to the gene pool. I looked up a couple of MSDS, and it seems that PVA glue ("white glue"), is safe to ingest. The Elmer's glue "recommended" in the original Reddit post is a form of white glue.
I'm pretty sure all babies don't know that we are not supposed to eat glue. Should we kill them off too?
The premise was people need advice on eating glue have bad genes. Babies commonly need those advice, whether it's from AI or not.
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They keep saying it's impossible, when the truth is it's just expensive.
That's why they wont do it.
You could only train AI with good sources (scientific literature, not social media) and then pay experts to talk with the AI for long periods of time, giving feedback directly to the AI.
Essentially, if you want a smart AI you need to send it to college, not drop it off at the mall unsupervised for 22 years and hope for the best when you pick it back up.
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