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For years, the word “Google“means that one uses a search engine to take advantage of the vast data available on the Internet. Today, it means wading through a torrent of advertisements and unwanted messages, in addition to responses artificial intelligence not accurate at all recently.
Pichai interfered with one of the most successful and profitable technology products of all time in a way that made it completely unreliable and even risky. It is only a matter of time before Pichai decides to stop the service. The sooner he takes that step, the better.
Google Lame Excuses
Currently, Google said that it is working on developing its search service using artificial intelligence with every new report of an artificial intelligence hallucination incident (which has become a torrent, according to what I see on Twitter). A Google spokesperson told The Verge that the errors occur in queries that are generally uncommon and do not represent most people’s experiences.
But this is a weak excuse for a company that prides itself on being responsible for regulating the world’s information. Infrequent queries should also generate reliable results, since the majority of Google searches consist of a long series of uncommon queries.
This is a stunning turnaround for a company that was once so cautious that it refused to release its generative AI technology that predated “gbt chat“ of OpenAI by at least two years. The company has since given up the race it started.” Microsoft and OpenAI, which raise controversy time after time.
Last week, OpenAI launched a new version of “Chat GPT” at a deliberate time on its part to anticipate Google’s launch of artificial intelligence the next day, but in the midst of these rapid events, Sam Altman spoiled the process of launching the new version and entered into a dispute. With actress Scarlett Johansson.
Different scale
“It simply works,” a famous quote by Steve Jobs from 2011, embodied an era in which reliability was the standard for technology products. But the more technology companies show how generative AI doesn’t work, the more difficult it will be for them to prove its usefulness to business customers and individual users alike.
But even that Elon Musk, who is about to raise $6 billion for his startup xAI, is not using the generative AI tools at his companies SpaceX and Starlink because they keep making mistakes.
“I ask AI some questions about the Fermi Paradox, rocket engine design, and electrochemistry, and so far its answers to all of those questions have been poor,” Musk said at the Milken Institute Summit earlier this month.
New era
If Google sticks with AI Overview and doesn’t shut down the service, an increase in misinformation will clearly be one of the consequences. The other consequence is that we will become accustomed to foolish mistakes made by artificial intelligence, just as we have become accustomed to ignoring spam used for search engine optimization and paid advertising.
We will also become accustomed to more mediocre service than before in light of the limited other options. Google’s global market share for searches has declined to 82% from 87% about a decade ago.
In this new era, we will surrender to the existence of substandard software that was previously described as capable of achieving a revolutionary transformation in the world, but now requires constant fact-finding.
Future path
AI hallucinations are not a new problem, but it seems to be one we are getting used to to our detriment. When some errors appeared in Google’s first bid for Bard in February 2023, Alphabet’s stock price fell 7%, erasing $100 billion from the company’s market value.
The stock price rose about 1% last Friday despite the spread of more posts of the company’s latest artificial intelligence lapses on social media platforms. Wall Street doesn’t seem to care about those mistakes. But does Google care?
We’ll find out if Pichai pauses the company’s new AI feature until further adjustments are made or when he takes that step, as he did with Gemini’s image generator in February.
It would be another humiliating withdrawal, but Pichai should take that step in order to put technology back on a path that allows it to return to the stage of “simply working,” as Jobs said.