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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1144 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

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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So I know a lot of posters here are doing some really advanced stuff with AI, but I have a quick little anecdote from my own luddite life that might help explain why most normies don't really see AI as something particularly useful.

I just asked Google's free AI what the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold is and it completely face-planted, ignoring the decimal and the zero and giving me the value for 35 ounces. This isn't a case of overactive guardrails or confusing syntax or hallucinating plausible details into a news story; it's the most basic of transcription errors, the kind that dumb, pre-LLM systems have solved for decades. Old google never would have made such an error.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order? It makes sense for normies to be skeptical. Regardless of what the frontier labs have cooking, the AI most people actually interact with is worse than useless half the time.

Anybody else have one of these "the fuck are we even doing here?" moments with AI recently?

Google's AI is embarrassingly bad.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order?

I think LLM-tech is over-hyped, and I think this site's rationalist/EA DNA makes its commentariat hype it even above that over-credulous baseline.

Even still, it's probably unfair to judge the current state of the LLM frontier by whatever Google is doing. Their latest Gemini models are dogshit, and anecdotally represent a regression over previous releases. The fact that they can't even get a new pro model out the door reinforces my opinion.

My work is using it along with GPT for various tasks. Management loves Gemini for some reason. It can't even consistently summarize emails. It will hallucinate basic things like who said what, or even completely invert the plain statements of speakers. This doesn't do too much damage, because management tended to hallucinate a lot in the first place, so all we've really done is streamline their rejection of reality.

When I have tried to use it for coding tasks, it frequently shits the bed because it invents APIs that don't exist, refuses to use tool calls, and goes into schizophrenic reasoning loops. I use it because politics demand that I be a team player, but at this point I'm pretty sure I've already lost more time to it than I will ever save.

In contrast, the latest GPT models are... OK I guess. They still hallucinate once you go a few steps off the beaten path, but it's not omnipresent and endemic like it is with the Gemini lineage. I think it's insane that we've spent nearly a decade and approximately 50 Manhattan projects worth of money to accomplish that level of utility, but it's... OK.

all we've really done is streamline their rejection of reality.

Poor old Scott Adams. This would make a great Dilbert punchline.

If Scott Adams weren't dead, the current business zeitgeist around LLMs would kill him.

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