Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> So 100% accurate can't be the goal. Obviously the goal is to get the responses to be less obviously stupid.

I'm not sure I agree. I think you're right that 100% accuracy is potentially unfeasable as a realistic aim, but I think the question is how accurate something needs to be in order to be a useful proposition for search.

AI that's as knowledgable as I am is a good achievement and helpful for a lot of use cases, but if I'm searching "What's the capital of Mongilia" someone with averageish knowledge taking a punt with "Maybe Mongoliana City?" is not helpful at all- if I can't trust AI responses to a high degree, I'd much rather just have normal search results showing me other resources I can trust.

Google's bar for justifying adding AI to their search proposition isn't "be better than asking someone on the street", it's "be better than searching google without any AI results"

The problem is that in all the shared examples, Google ai search does not respond with a Maybe xyz, question mark? like you did. It always answers with high confidence and can't seem to navigate any gray area where there are multiple differing opinions or opposing source of truths.

Yeah the "manipulating language cogently is intelligence" premise that underlines this "AI" cycle is proving itself wrong in a grand way.

I should have been more clear. I am referring to Google's goals. Humanity as an abstract concept or you personally may have other goals, but, well, perhaps I am a cynic, but I think Google's goals are rather more monetary and less idealistic than they would represent. They don't want or need (as other replies correctly point out) the AI to always be correct and accurate. Along with general cynicism with regard to any conceivable AI's ability to do that, it is also fair to point out that the web itself doesn't have that ability either. We can't even find an objective yardstick to measure an AI with that way. Google's goal is to make the bad press go away so people use the AI more so that in the indefinite but ideally near future this AI can be monetized somehow to justify the interstellar valuations being ascribed to this technology in the "if it isn't happening in two fiscal quarters or less it might as well not exist" US/Western financial markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com