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.”
Just focusing on one product for this discussion: search
One of the big problems, is because search chooses winners, it’s naturally a competition. Which means even if Google wanted to stay good, the ecosystem would change and adapt to them. They’re always on a treadmill.
Google was magical, before everyone was competing on the metrics Google used. Once they gamified it, The ecosystem fundamentally changed.
I’m not apologizing for Google, they’re intrinsically incentivized to behave badly, and the fact that they kill lots of good products is a sign of their myopic culture. I just want to indicate no ecosystem stay static when winners and losers exist.