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.”
Yeah no shit, that’s what LLMs do
They could probably mostly or entirely fix it, but to do so they’d have to better curate search results. Because what it does is summarize the top search results for the query.
The problem they can’t fix is consistently getting useful high quality search results to the top without getting misinfo, disinfo, irrelevant info, trolling, answers to similar but not identical questions or memes as high or higher.