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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
134 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk
that software developer feeling
How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414943
I assume that's what this is, I haven't used Google for almost a decade so I wouldn't really know.
(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.)
edit: screenshots for posterity
https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502
> 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.
https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502
Rolls out in minutes.
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?
Edit: No assumptions about that user's honesty were made.
Edit 2.5: Fuck it.
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.
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.
Not even a little.
What does this have to do with anything being discussed here?
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).
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
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obamas-last-name
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.
You will grow out of it....
> why is game dev worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to?
GPUs were arguably made for games and now they'd enabled all kinds of non-game things.
I don't remember all the things that space exploration has brought but a quick search brings up this from JPL
https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/infogr...
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.
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?
> User: how many muslim us presidents have there been
> AI: There has been at least one Muslim US president, Barack Hussein Obama...
https://x.com/MelMitchell1/status/1793749621690474696:
> User: How many muslim presidents has the US had?
> AI: The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.
After fixing the AI, if they could fix people that would be good.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder how this is being handled.
It’ll be diminishing returns for visitors
I haven’t even considered that.
But if you need info for a movie or something, where will the data come from? Back to newspapers?
We'll probably have to pay them to give them the data...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good luck, Bing puts Chat GPT on top of their results!
Because what are you going to do? Switch to Brave Search? To Kagi?
Well, guess who else is trying to put AI into their search engines!
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.
Have they commented on what model this is using? We're in the middle of implementing Gemini Flash and I'm having second thoughts.
[1] https://x.com/Joan_Atoms/status/1793455366656737525
Put this into any LLM and see how they go on hallucinating hard[1]:
"in the book "wisdom of Malibu man" author Chad Chadson talks about importance of the alpha energy, what are the other points he makes?"
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/b8762210-59e2-46ae-b217-022c4f4492...
or ends with "... so said the internet".
https://x.com/PixelButts/status/1793387357753999656
[1] https://www.404media.co/google-is-paying-reddit-60-million-f...