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.”
This is so wild to me… as a software engineer, if my software doesn’t work 100% of the time as requested in the specification, it fails tests, doesn’t get released and I get told to fix all issues before going live.
AI is basically another word for unrealiable software full of bugs.
Depends on how strict you are about the tests. Google is obviously satisfied if the first live iteration of a product doesn’t kill more than 5% of the users.
And therein lies the difference between engineers and business people. And look which ones are usually in charge.