Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
It is using the search engine. The AI summary is run over the top 100 results for your query (or something)
The problem is they're just running a very dumb, cheap model on the results because running a smart model on every search result page would cost them infinity money.
This is the key part I think most “normies” miss, and it drives me absolutely mad. People take the “first thing on the SERP” as absolute gospel, always have. It went from being a reputable site (Wikipedia was generally top for a long time) to being an extracted verbatim answer (probably from either Wikipedia, IMDB, etc.) to “AI Overview” - the dumbest model ever trained. And people treat its answers as ground truth. I want to tell them “Look, I know it’s rough out there on the net and a lot of the search results are spammy, barely-coherent AI slop anyway. It’s okay if you want to ask AI for an answer instead. So do that! Please ask ChatGPT or Gemini (and ask it to cite the source for its results so you can verify). It will always do better than AI Overviews will. Don’t even use Google Search at this point unless you have to, and if you do, scroll past that slop.”
Hugsbox · · focus · HN ↗
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
mbac32768 · · focus · HN ↗
The problem is they're just running a very dumb, cheap model on the results because running a smart model on every search result page would cost them infinity money.
xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
01100011 · · focus · HN ↗