cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15864003
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.”
Really interesting to see just how fast this hype curve might pass. From “they’re taking our jobs” to “what are they useful for again” pretty quickly it seems.
Still, I personally would encourage everyone to keep up vigilance against the darker capitalistic implications that this “episode” has confronted us with.
Perhaps AGI isn’t around the corner … but this whole AI thing has been moving relatively quickly. Many may have forgotten, but AlphaGO beating the world champion was kinda shocking at the time and basically no one saw it coming (the player, then no 1 in the world, AFAIU, retired from Go afterward). And this latest leap into bigger models for image and text generation is still impressive once you stop expecting omniscient digital overlords (which has been a creepy as fuck inclination amongst so many people).
It’s been 7-8 years since AlphaGo. In 7-8 years, we could be looking down the barrel of more advanced AI tools without any cultural or political development around what capitalism is liable to do with such things.