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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4843 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 24, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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"Can cockroaches live in your penis?"

Google AI: Yes! It's totally normal too.

Is there some esoteric force sabotaging Google's AI projects?

First there was the black Vikings, now there are random silly screenshots from their search AI. I suspect much is inspect element related but the meme has been bouncing around. There's a thread here: https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1794543007129387208

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/cringe-worth-google-ai-overviews

I've been using Brave which has had a similar feature for some time. Brave's AI is generally useful and right 75% of the time, though you can never quite be sure. When it is wrong, it's never 'yes, doctors recommend you to smoke cigarettes while pregnant' tier wrong. I don't ask many questions that could be disturbingly wrong. Those who use google, are the silly results plausible, cherrypicked, invented? Is Microsoft using GPT-5 bots to sabotage the reputation of their competitors?

For what it's worth, I've been unable to reproduce the cockroaches in penis answer. Though I'm sure at least some of the viral screenshots are legitimate, and there's definitely a team spending their entire memorial day weekend quashing these as they come up.

Technically, one issue is that there would be a different LLM being used in search than elsewhere. The one used in search would prioritize cost and speed above all else. A couple minutes worth of Google search inferences is a greater volume than probably a day's worth of inferences across all of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Naturally, quality is going to suffer. And even if Google were inclined to, it simply doesn't have the hardware to run its top-of-the-line model for every search query. (No one does.)

For comparison, Brave handles maybe 10 QPS? Google is closer to 100k QPS.

Google needs to improve quality, but that's probably not even its main priority right now: it needs to decrease costs.

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