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.”
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.