If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treating statistically common sequences of words on the whole internet as a source of truth may not actually be a very good idea.
Which is so sad given that practically everybody I know wants nothing to do with either, but with two party system everybody needs to classify themselves or let others choose for them.
Our two-party system is nothing like "far right vs far left".
A "far left" position would be something along the lines of "we should murder all billionaires, confiscate all money from anyone making more than 1 standard deviation above mean income, nationalize all businesses, and redistribute the profits evenly among all."
A "far right" position would be something along the lines of "we should institute a white-supremacist theocratic government with an autocratic leader unaccountable to anyone else."
One of these is almost precisely the party platform of one of the two major parties in the US. The other is laughed at by nearly anyone with any political acumen, and certainly looks nothing like the party platform of the other major party.
Serious question - why is space exploration worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to? What's the real gain that is worth using those resources for space exploration, or not using the resources at all?
It's just a phase....Any sufficiently advanced civilization, after a while, will give up on space exploration. Maybe send a few probes here and there, to collect some extra rocks missing from their collection.
There is only so many Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Nebulas, Planets and Comets to study and after you have studying a few million, they all look the same. Once you've seen one supermassive black hole bend light and time, you've seen them all.
What is the real gain? Resources. There are a ton of resources up there.
Knowledge. A lot of things we have today we have because of our previous space race. But the real reason... It is virtually free. The budget is almost 0 compared to everything else the government does.
For the near zero budget part, do you just mean sending up a few more probes? Surely finding, collecting, and using natural resources in space would be an extremely expensive affair.
But imagine if one day Google jumped the shark and did some training on some of its other properties only it could have access to in order to glean better information?
Remember when MS made ham-fisted fun of Google's free mail service because google scanned clear-text portions of mail messages supposedly for better ad-targeting?
I get that part, but why specifically forgetting Obama's middle name?
I don't recall there being too many memes about that, or the "Obama is a Muslim" conspiracy theories caring much about his middle name being Hussein (their argument centers around who Barack's father was).
A bit of a late reply, but it seems I misremembered the meme, the joke was his last name, not his middle name [0]
It's dated 2012, but I remember a resurgence in more recent years, which seems to coincide with the Interest Graph (Which shows the spike in 2022)
Even then it doesn't seem like it was too viral
I thought it'd be appropriate, the whole joke being acting as if the name isn't known, regardless of it literally being in the message, it seems like exactly the thing that would trip up an LLM
I think it's just more a testament to how strong a candidate Obama the person was, as well as a good indicator of the value in looking to those who overcome oppositional factors for merits over those who had a paved path before them.
Uhh, not quite true. I just asked it, and it said...
> The United States has not had any presidents who have publicly identified as Muslim. The vast majority of presidents have been Christian, with most belonging to Protestant denominations. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for holding office, so a Muslim (or person of any faith) can certainly become president in the future.
I'm curious what you think about the post that you replied to.
Are you assuming that the author is lying? Have you weighed the likelihood of that against the likelihood that the author actually saw what they said, and that the reason you don't see the same might be because Google fixed it in the meantime, or that it only happens when phrased a different exact way, or because the responses may be indeterministic even with the exact same query in the first place?
Simply put, someone stated as truth that a thing would "confidently" do something. I was curious, and in my use it does not confidently do that thing. Why it did/doesn't do it is irrelevant to me, because I was only curious as to whether or not the assertion was true.
Edit: No assumptions about that user's honesty were made.
Confidently != consistently. If I walk up to someone and say "there are lots of ripe apples on the tree outside, I'm going to run out and grab some", then that is me confidently stating that there are ripe apples on the tree outside (regardless of whether it is true or not). But if half an hour later, I say the opposite, or even just don't mention it at all anymore, then I haven't done so consistently, even if I was saying it confidently before.
It's not a person. When it "says" something confidently, that just means it's predicted a string that, interpreted by humans, appears confident. It's completely unrelated to whether the output values of the model are "confident" (highly contrasting).
A predictive text system, driven non-deterministically, can "confidently" say one thing some of the time, and "confidently" say a completely different thing. It probably will, if it "knows" that the expected output should be something said confidently.
It's non-deterministic of course, and it's entirely possible that Google is hotfixing egregious failures with RLHF after they go viral. It was giving that result earlier though.
When doing a search about famous Muslims in the US, I just got the AI box to pop up briefly, then collapse and say “AI search summary is not available for this query.” Sounds like they’re just blocking anything with the word Muslim in it now from activating the AI box.
Oh boy talk about inviting yourself to IP lawsuits galore. While it’s nice thought and in many cases probably impractical (returning source information that far down the rabbit hole), even if it were possible and practical it would be against a business operating these services best interests.
I think they are terrified of GenAI eliminating people's desire to do traditional web searches. It's basically the quick answers Google has been offering for years, but much more in depth and complete (if correct).
My dad has been talking a lot about how he wants to start using ChatGPT more instead of Google, and he thinks is going to make his life much better.
I would assume to appease the markets, whose limited collective wisdom is currently zeroing in on AI. Google has been known to overreact before; remember Google+, at the height of the social media boom?
That’s an interesting thought. Just order your fast food through Gemini, or schedule your car repair or book a hotel directly through gemini without going to a different website.
I would imagine Google doing something like: “just use this service to keep your information up to date and you’ll get monetized automatically based on users querying your data”.
Right now they have us convinced to optimize how we give them data for them to be able to parse it (schema.org, etc). So we give them the data, optimize it for them ingesting it, then we loose traffic because people get the data on the search page.
We'll probably have to pay them to give them the data...
Yeah, but thinking about it now, this happens because Google has a monopoly on search and they can afford to dictate the rules. I think that with more companies competing with AI the field is a bit more even, and Google would be the one needing this kind of “advantage”.
I honestly wonder if there's eventually going to be "sponsored" answers. I shudder to even think of it, but it seems naive to think we are not going in that direction.
If they had any sense at all (questionable) they would be absolutely pants-shittingly terrified that their prized product has been completely undercut by an upstart in a matter of months, and that Microsoft has a deep partnership with that competitor. I'd think even the leadership at Google can figure out that ChatGPT eats their lunch in terms of cutting through the SEO bullshit and giving actual information.
If they were even approaching baseline-clever, they'd realize that they've caused people to be so pissed at the declining quality of their search for years and that they'll happily jump ship.
Completely is a wild overstatement of what OpenAI has done to Google. There was an article on hackernews a few weeks ago about the actual trends that showed GPT had barely scratched Google's share of traffic and that OpenAI was hemorrhaging users after the initial sign up.
Google was always better than Yahoo/Bing at dealing with webspam (whether Google can continue to beat current webspam is a different debate). Bing is happily traning on the things they don't know are bad results. Garbage in garbage out.
The only competition Google needs to worry about is Google's leadership. Once Cloud brought in TK and they started actively recruiting from Microsoft and Oracle it was like an infection of stupid they haven't been able to fight.
Not sure if it's strictly the recruiting pool that made things break down, but I see it more as a result of COVID/WFH + the recruiting pool. Google's strong in-office culture once helped new joiners learn the culture and challenge others in a respectful way - now it's a political minefield.
Remote work is great, but it probably accelerated Google's culture decline. If you've been there a while, you'll notice the wild difference in employee attitudes when comparing pre-2019 employees to post 2020 employees.
Depending on who you ask, Google's search issues started as early as 2010 (Instant) or 2016 ("brands"). Many of the things people complain about regarding Google's culture - shuttering projects arbitrarily, hiring issues (the interview gauntlet, anti-competitive practices, etc.), the slow erosion of Don't Be Evil - are 2010s products, also. I don't think this is WFH, at its root.
> Remote work is great, but it probably accelerated Google's culture decline.
Absolutely agree. A lot of the top talent bailed when they started demanding return to office. Google played the "if you don't X we will fire you" with a bunch of L7+ that ... surprise, could easily get jobs elsewhere or had enough GSUs to flat out retire.
Yeah, I left to start my own company (which I was already contemplating) but some of the changes in early 2023 were the catalyst that I needed to make the jump. I made sure to give the best feedback that I could in my exit interview, but I doubt it has much of an impact at a company that large.
Personally, every time I see chat GPT's output I just skip it. I look at it and I'm not sure it's quoting things literally or changing them, so I can't trust anything the summary says, and if I'm going to click the links anyway, I don't need the summary.
At least it is marked (for now) as AI-generated. Google is and always has been a black-box. Surely only a matter of time before "AI" on "traditional" (probably using "AI" too?) are mixed and merged, etc.
I don't think it's available here, at least not right now. One advantage (or disadvantage, depending on perspective) of the EC's increasingly grumpy privacy and anti-trust oriented internet regulations is that companies are becoming reluctant to throw any old shit over the wall here; "rush something, anything, out as quickly as possible to appease the shareholders" products, like this one, tend to have delayed launches in Europe.
(A less objectionable example: Threads, which seems to have been held up by DMA/DSA compliance; allowing read access without a loginwall and so on.)
And here we see how Google management discovers what their researchers have been saying for quite a while now: you can’t get any long tail “intelligence” out of a model that fits on a single TPU host.
For comparison, here’s GPT4o: “Eating rocks is not safe or recommended for humans. Rocks are not digestible and can cause serious harm to your digestive system, including blockages, perforations, and other injuries. If you have cravings for non-food items, this might be a condition called pica, which requires medical attention. It's best to consult a healthcare professional for proper guidance.”
I am 100% convinced that "traditional" Google search moved to come kind of embeddings distance, LLM based algorithm at some point in the last 12 months.
I've noticed a distinct change in the results where now what I get back seems MUCH more related to "semantic similarity" with my search query I actually entered.
Great examples of this are when you search for a highly common topic, but specifically related to a highly niche sub-variant or focus area.
"Old" Google would have hooked into the edge-case as being a critical part of the query and zeroed in on that specificity (which you wanted), whereas now it will just go "these results were semantically similar to 95% of your search query, therefore they must be most relevant" - totally ignoring that the 5% it ignored was the critical differentiator.
Another way to trigger this behaviour really easily is to look for a contrarian view on something widely discussed by adding "not" or "doesn't" into the query. Google will just straight up ignore your input, returning a tonne of results that are 95% semantic matches for the words you used, but missing that ONE tiny point where you were searching for literally the opposite of what it returned.
I'm beginning to suspect that Bing's "copilot" sends some questions out for human review. When I ask something sensitive but not that common, sometimes there's no reply at all for over a minute.
On a slight side note, I heard Reddit is selling or wants to sell its data. If I had to guess there is a lot of sarcasm and dark humor in that data, which companies may not want in their llm.
I think it just highlights how bad Google's algorithm has become. Answers from the Onion, Reddit, and other highly inaccurate sources. Doesn't help that everyone has already gamified the Google search results. I used top be able to find an answer to a difficult question by going 2-3 pages deep. Now, I know if I have to go past the 1st page its all spam.
Side note, when did Reddit unarchive posts? I remember years ago they stopped allowing new comments on a post, but here is a decade-old post with new comments!
And to stay on topic- this is exactly why ChatGPT took off. OpenAI says they were surprised by the huge response…but, their intense (and yeah controversial) RLHF really pays off with not suggesting soooo much of this wrong / dangerous stuff.
Google of course is allergic to human intervention in anything.
Moderators can turn archiving on or off in subreddit settings. That dictates whether someone can comment or not comment on posts older than six months.
Edit: it is now interesting how much power subreddit mods have over AI in the near future. Have a lot of disinformation in your subreddit? Lock it, and screw up the billion dollar AI.
>Side note, when did Reddit unarchive posts? I remember years ago they stopped allowing new comments on a post, but here is a decade-old post with new comments!
You say "here is a decade-old post", but... where is it? The main article from this thread only contains links to The Onion, BlueSky and The Verge, unless I've missed one.
imho all Ai should be forced to show their level of confidence in what they say. (also cite sources)
Any Ai that LIES about the level of confidence will get fined/removed.
There are many exampled of Ai that "hallucinates" in really obvious ways. that makes them Lies not hallucinations.
Google used to show me sarcastic articles as news stories in my Google feed and Google news. It became so bad from me clicking on articles about a specific industry, reading and realizing they are sarcastic, and Google sending me more articles that were largely sarcastic. These were stories from sites like The Onion.
I filed a bug, and gave a lot of detail and linked to screenshots of my feed, News page and identified all the news stores that were not news. They closed the bug saying it was not a bug. I tried convincing them that this is a problem. They denied. I got frustrated and just blocked the domains. Its almost laughable the AI search is suffering from the same issue.
Am I having a stroke or does this article randomly veer into a totally separate topic on right wing conspiracies never to return to the original topic? I kept reading wondering how this was related to Google AI misinformation but it never happened.
edit: screenshots for posterity
https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502