“The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent,” he added. “Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry.”
Needless to say, we haven’t seen anything like that yet. OpenAI’s top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail’s pace and requires constant supervision.
Even your manual search results may have you find incorrect sources, selection bias for what you want to see, heck even AI generated slop, so the AI generated results will just be another layer on top. Link aggregating search engines are slowly becoming useless at this rate.
While that’s true, the thing that stuck out to me is not even that the AI was mislead by itself finding AI slop, or even somebody falsely asserting something. I googled something with a particular yea or no answer. “Does X technology use Y protocol”. The AI came back with “Yes it does, and here’s how it uses it”, and upon visiting the reference page for that answer, it was documentation for that technology where it explained very clearly that x technology does NOT use Y protocol, and then went into detail on why it doesn’t. So even when everything lines up and the answer is clear and unambiguous, the AI can give you an entirely fabricated answer.
What’s really awful is that it seems like they’ve trained these LLMs to be “helpful”, which means to say “yes” as much as possible. But, that’s the case even when the true answer is “no”.
I was searching for something recently. Most people with similar searches were trying to do X, I was trying to do Y which was different in subtle but important differences. There are tons of resources out there showing how to do X, but none showing how to do Y. The “AI” answer gave me directions for doing Y by showing me the procedure for doing X, with certain parts changed so that they match Y instead. It doesn’t work like that.
Like, imagine a recipe that not just uses sugar but that relies on key properties of sugar to work, something like caramel. Search for “how do I make caramel with stevia instead of sugar” and the AI gives you the recipe for making caramel with sugar, just with “stevia” replacing every mention of “sugar” in the original recipe. Absolutely useless, right? The correct answer would be “You can’t do that, the properties are just too different.” But, an LLM knows nothing, so it is happy just to substitute words in a recipe and be “helpful”.
Ironically, Google might be accelerating its own downfall as it tries to copy the “market”, considering LLMs are just a hole in its pocket.