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.”
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.