The head of Google *Search right now is the same guy that was head of yahoo search when it was dying. To put all of this in perspective.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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The head of Google Search
FTFY
Thanks.
Being a CEO must be amazing. You can fail and even bring an entire company down, and keep on getting the same job somewhere else.
He has experience and obviously that means he learned a lesson after failing at a job that requires being a belligerent asshole to get.
Of the company doesn't even have to collapse, you just have to make it seem like it did. Lehman Brothers didn't go bankrupt in the sense of the word a normal person thinks. If you or I go bankrupt it means ramen for dinner for the next decade. For Lehman it was just a strategic move.
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yahoogle
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TBH I hate the term "hallucination" in this context. It's just more BS anthropomorphizing. More marketing for "AI" (also BS). Can't we just call it like garbage or GIGO or something more accurate? This is nothing new. I know that scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing but just saying...
We don't choose. It's decided to be the term for this. Computer bugs aren't bugs. Etc etc. It's just what the scientists called it
scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing
Even though I agree in this context “hallucination” is actually the scientific term. It might be poorly chosen but in LLM circles if you use the term hallucination, the vast majority of people, will understand precisely what you mean, namely not an error in programming, or a bad dataset, but rather that the language model worked well, generating sentences that are syntactically correct, that are roughly thematically coherent, and yet are factually incorrect.
So I obviously don't want to support marketing BS, in AI or elsewhere, but here sadly it matches the scientific naming.
PS: FWIW I believed I made a similar critic few months, or maybe even years, ago. IMHO what's more important is arguably questioning the value of LLMs themselves, but then it might not be as evident for many people who are benefiting from the current buzz.
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I mean.. yeah layoff a whole bunch of people and start treating your employees like replaceable commodities.. then go ahead and arrogantly deploy technology you don't understand and :surprisepikachu: everything breaks.
But management get to do things without personal consequence, as they'll just lay off more workers to cover their absolute incompetence and things will continue to get worse.
Perhaps we should be replacing C-suite dipshits with AI's instead.
Can we swap out the word "hallucinations" for the word "bullshit"?
I think all AI/LLM stuf should be prefaced as "someone down the pub said..."
So, "someone down the pub said you can eat rocks" or, "someone down the pub said you should put glue on your pizza".
Hallucinations are cool, shit like this is worthless.
Google search isnt a hallucination now though.
It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with. For example, the "glue on pizza" comment is from a reddit user called FuckSmith roughly 11 years ago.
It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with.
What do you mean by that? This isn't some secret but literally how LLMs work. lol What people mean by hallucinating is when LLMs "create" facts that aren't any. Be it this genius recipe of glue pizza, or any other wild combination of its model's source material. The whole cooking thing is a great analogy actually because it's like all of their fed information are the ingredients, and it just spits out various recipes based on those ingredients, without any guarantee that it is actually edible.
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No, hallucination is a really good term. It can be super confident and seemingly correct but still completely made up.
I think delusion might be a better word. You can hallucinate and know it's not real
It is, but it isnt applicable in at least the glue-pizza situation as the probable source comment has been found on reddit.
A better use of the term might be how when you try to get Bing's image creator to make "Battletech" art, you just mostly get really obvious Warhammer 40k Space Marines and occasionally Iron Maiden album art.
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Today I caught myself unconsciously went to Duckduckgo to make a search (even tho the browser start page is already google).
Thinking back, I've been using duckduckgo more than google, and often because I can't find what I'm looking for on Google but ads and autogenerated fake webpages.
History will prove it once again, there's no such thing as "too big to fail".
DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.
Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.
Yeah sometimes it do be like that, especially if you're searching for some obscure things or localized events then DDG is still worse than GG.
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There's no better time to switch your default search engine!
On the other hand, all these AI errors by Google have made for some great memes recently.
LLM aka a Large Language Memes
Seems like LLM's true value is comedy value
It's just a fucking Chinese Room
Look my wife is gonna dispute that charge.
This is what I love about Mike Judge's work. It turns out to be always the best metaphor/reference/prophecy of the boring dystopia. Since 1999.
Idiocracy is the most unrealistic sci-fi/apocolyptic film ever made. President Comacho finds the most qualified person to help with a crisis, asks them for advice and then doesnt take credit for it. Noone put in a position of power would ever do that.
He used Not Sure as a smokescreen since the beginning, the whole point is that he never really understood what was going on. I am quite sure that American presidents are approaching that level of idiocy.
"Hey, we just promised you answers. We never promised you correct answers." -- Google Marketing, probably.
"Besides, the more incorrect answers - the more time users will spend on our site and use our service to get the correct answer = more ads shown = more profit!"
Testing in Prod. Stay classy, Google.
“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement to Gizmodo, noting many of the examples the company has seen have been from uncommon queries.
This is entirely fair. There is no way that anyone at Google could have anticipated that humans would search for strange things on the internet.
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Why does search need to be AI? I've had no problems finding any information I wanted under the former process.
You obviously haven’t used the ~~web3 nocode blockchain NFT~~ AI enough to have an informed opinion.
Can I super-mega-ultra upvote this?
It's the same playbook as ever. Doubt can only be explained by ignorance, failure can only be explained by under-committing,
The only way to have a "valid" opinion is to have already bought-in and be actively selling other people on it. It's the same mentality as a cult or a pyramid scheme.
I think it's been a long time since digital companies tried to solve actual problems.
It’s become more efficient to get basic info on virtually any topic by just asking an LLM like ChatGPT and that could be a serious threat to Google Search. People might form the habit of asking AIs for everything and then go to Google Search only when they want to dig deeper / find relevant articles etc. So I assume they added their own AI right into Search in an effort to continue being the first (and perhaps only) place one goes to for information.
Does anyone have a realistic idea of how this happened? I get Google has been fallen off for awhile but they're still a multi billion dollar company.
AI doesn't exist. It's a huge model that aggregates existing shit with some filler content to glue it all together. It is not sentient, it's not creative, it's literally a stochastic parrot
So, when the original content is garbage, the output is also garbage. Shit in shit out when you train from fucking Reddit
Always remember that having more money doesn't mean someone (or some entity) is more capable or intelligent. It just means they have way more latitude to fuck up, higher potential to hurt more people, and less chance of facing negative consequences when they do.
Easy: worse results with more ads means more searches and thus more ad impressions, therefore profit.
That'll only work for so long, but that seems to be what they're doing.
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