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.”
The Internet immediately worked, which is one big difference. The dot com financial bubble has nothing to do with the functionality of the internet.
In this case, there is both a financial bubble, and a “product” that doesn’t really work, and which they can’t make any better (as he admits in this article.)
It was obvious from day 1 how useful the Internet would be. Email alone was revolutionary. We are still trying to figure out what the real uses for LLM are. There appear to be some valid use cases outside of creating spam and plagiarizing other people’s work, but it doesn’t appear to be any kind of revolutionary technology.
LLMs “dont work” because people are promising idiotic things and being used recklessly for things they are not good at. This is like saying a chainsaw is a failed product because it’s not good at slicing sushi
Hindsight 20/20. There were a lot of people smarter than you and i predicting that the internet was just a fad
Summarizing is something that it does very well. Still not 100% but, when using RAG and telling it “don’t make shit up” can result in pretty good compute efficiency and results.
Like translation, which has already taken money out of the pockets of 40% of translators?
+ customer service, incl. sources
November 2022: ChatGPT is released
April 2024 survey: 40% of translators have lost income to generative AI - The Guardian
Also of note from the podcast Hard Fork:
There’s a client you would fire… if copywriting jobs weren’t harder to come by these days as well.
Customer service impact, last October:
And this past February - potential 700 employee impact at a single company:
If you’re technical, the tech isn’t as interesting [yet]:
Overall, costs down, capabilities up (neat demos):
Hope everyone reading this keeps up their skillsets and fights for Universal Basic Income for the rest of humanity :)