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.”
Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:
This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google’s culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they’ll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.
The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they’ll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that’s needed to build something real like this.
Hah well, in my defence I did do the sweaty five guys in a basement startup thing in my 20’s. Nowadays I’m more concerned with paying the mortgage and keeping my newborn alive.
I agree with everything you’re saying. Google hasn’t been the plucky, disruptive underdog in the arena for at least a decade. They’re corporate and bloated. All that matters to Google, and more broadly any incumbent and large corporation, is to inflate the stock price. The products don’t matter, the tech doesn’t matter, all that matters is make stock # go up. The stock is Google’s product.
Unfortunately in the current economic environment, capital is more expensive now and the incumbent heavy weights are doing everything they can to build regulatory moats around their cash cows. I don’t think we’ll see any competing startups with real tech and engineering innovations for some time.