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Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

I'm not optimistic, but my recent experiences with Gemini's mobile app gives me pause on my pessimism.

My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation.

If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.

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I feel like for any place that Gemini can give you worthwhile information about there will be a number of other sources that can give you more reliable info about it. Granted I tend to take trips to oddball places so I might not be the best judge.

I just tried asking Gemini about some popular destinations spots near my house that I know well and the answers weren't very impressive. Much of the responses didn't actually pertain to my specific questions and the useful info was pretty standard stuff that could be found anywhere. Some of it was straight up wrong as well. For example I asked about good hikes that aren't too crowded and it recommended the single most crowded trail in the area.

I'm more than a little curious on what sort of questions you would have needed an AI to query regarding a trip? Like, genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had.

We travel as a family a fair bit nowadays, and building an agenda for each day of the trip is surprisingly not that difficult if you are going to any common destination. Biggest thing to not forget is to add slack so that you can rearrange on the fly if needed.

> genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had

We're in the US, and we're looking at a UK trip. I've lived in the UK, and we've done a fair amount of international travel. We're in the "brainstorming" mode. I'd characterize the conversation as verbal googling.

We were asking questions about distances between cities, typical ticket rates for trains, things to do in various locations, etc.

Ok, so it isn't so much that you were brainstorming in a creative way. You were largely using it as a way to get various searches recorded all through a single "session"/"interface?" I think that makes a ton of sense. Thanks!

The big issue with LLM is how can you trust the information it gives you? It could be flat out making all or some of it up.

That's one of the things I like about the current implementation of Gemini - they seem to really be leaning in on grounding, and there are ref links for pretty much all of the stuff that I'd normally want to fact check form a chatbot.

The built in web search

https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf76e2-5124-8010-8f54-50d967625a...

It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. But I have no idea how they will fight against LLM-optimized SEO-hell. Like I could see products flat out flying in the ads, hoping for LLMs to pick that up and suggest to users. Source of truth will matter even more.

It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios.

And yet people still drive into rivers because Google Maps tells them to.

Never underestimate the power of "computers are never wrong."

How many times has that happened? Those cases make the headlines, but it’s so rare that, in my opinion, they can be disregarded. Nothing is perfect, just assess your risks and tolerance to error. That’s subjective, so one acts accordingly.

Once is enough.

It's easy to disregard when it isn't you or someone you love. The rest of us were born with empathy.

It’s really not though. It goes back to the whole “at that point you shouldn’t drive/fly/cross the road because you might die” argument. Literally millions (billions?) people commute every day using navigation apps. There will be accidents, but so far it’s been statistically insignificant, so people keep using them. Everyone has their own risk tolerances.

I mean that's one of the value propositions these folks have to weigh into their product offerings. At some point you either have a reputation for delivering accurate responses or not and that will dictate who uses it and how much they're willing to pay for it.

Gemini is laughable. Please check the advice it gave you, I promise it got some major things wrong.

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