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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.

What the fuck?

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I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.

Throughout my career, I've almost always been close enough to the user that I hear about it quickly when something is wrong. It's a tough problem that so many Google engineers are typically so far removed from end users. Or maybe it's just that a small part of the company has long subsidized the rest of the employees to the point that it doesn't matter how good their work is because they'll get paid anyway.

Ex-Googler.

The engineers are pressured to significantly reduce "dependencies" for projects. Anything that could become risk or create friction is dramatically less appetizing.

Simply because of how many people that *must* agree with your proposal. Getting all the relevant tech leads, some you have never heard of or ever spoken with, to agree on a proposal for your team's project is a nightmare.

So you keep it as simple and agreeable as possible. Given the circumstances, it makes sense as one of the engineers. It's fairly fine advice in general wherever you work, but it just haunts all the work you do at Google in particular. Nothing gets done otherwise.

If you have a dependency that can be dropped from an engineering perspective, that's the route the 9 leads reviewing your design doc will take:

"Let's iterate and start with just the basics (no user testing)", "let's get this working and user test in a later phase", "I think this problem is obvious enough we don't need to consult with users about it."

I worked in Ads Integrity at the time, and for one of my projects I was concerned how it would impact the manual reviewers. Then I learned I couldn't talk with them, only by proxy through another person if we really had to. And that proxy takes time, so...

Very insightful. I've worked in only one company of Google's size, but it was a vastly different industry. I personally never got to speak with a user on a massive internal application my team worked on for years. :)

I think that kind of model can work well if there's some other mechanism for ensuring a great user experience.

But without it... :)

Right. In a global financial services organization, a strategic analysis app used by thousands of internal users was pretty high touch. SME business analysts would sit with the users to make sure they liked it and had no trouble. Every user generates significant revenue. Worldwide B2C is a different ball game, and Google barely makes money off of each individual user.

> The engineers are pressured to significantly reduce "dependencies" for projects.

Is a major factor of this Google's tendency to kill entire products, so you obviously don't want to make your hot new thing dependent on some other internal thing that might be killed off?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Interestingly there is less opportunity for that to happen.

Most of the internal infrastructure is quite available and stable, and there are clear choices for almost all of your application-level and backend-level needs.

Guys, your argument reads so weird. It outputs PLAUSIBLE text. It doesn't actually have a connection to causally correct information, although plausiblness often coincidents with causally correctness.

When it says it can read videos you don’t trust it.

When it says it can’t read videos you think that’s an accurate introspection on its abilities?

(Rather than a statistically likely continuation of a conversation where one side seems to be reading videos and the other side says the read is inaccurate)

The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.

> The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.

More scary than funny, IMO.

The US military almost took an action that could very plausibly have escalated into a hot war with China because people are already relying too heavily on these systems.

Despite the reporting, nobody in power seems sufficiently freaked out about this.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false...

Well trump was so freaked out that CNN reported it that he banned them from the white house. But the military keeps using the AI all the same

Typical exchange:

Me: "You bastard."

Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."

Gemini is the worst gaslighter. It hallucinated a feature in an open source product. I said no that does not exist. It invented very realistic git commit messages. I said commit does not exist, so it said I was out of sync. I linked the repo and it said it might be a fork. Then it invented a mailing list thread where they supposedly removed the feature, that’s why I couldn’t find it.

Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.

These models are incapable of saying they don't know, because they have no concept of knowing. They simply predict the next word which is most likely.

The saddest part is when people take their experience with Google's idiotic AI implementation and assume that's how all LLMs work. Frontier-class models will, in fact, generally admit when they don't know something. That includes the one I run at home on my own graphics cards, but it seems that Google just doesn't GAF.

Your point about "predicting the next word" mostly means that your post was very easy to predict.

Maybe it's because they are trained on Internet comments, and the most rare thing to find on the Internet is someone admitting they don't know something.

But if they had been trained on comments saying "I don't know", they'd probably act the same as they do now but they'd treat "I don't know" as the answer.

This is such a 2024 take. Model will push back and tell you the knowledge gap they have, but people are just used to ask gooogle leading questions, which port badly to llm as it makes them defend the position instead of research data

I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.

An interesting conspiracy theory, as long as you're honest about what it is.

If you don't think the world is rife with criminal conspiracies you weren't paying attention in history class.

There's an enormous difference between outlandish claims about extraterrestrials or turning frog gays and believing there's a category of politicians trying to get wealthy off of their position. It's somewhat reasonable to hypothesize about criminal conspiracies in that 2nd scenario.

It takes either being scared to death to admit what's going on in the world, or an attention span of a guppy, to keep calling people conspiracy theorists these days.

Yup. I'm most familiar with Jill Lepore and Quinn Slobodian (and others in their respective orbits). They're both historians who've written extensively about Musk and Muskism (et al). Wild stuff.

Apparently the plan is to use AI slop, mediated thru social medias, to defeat the woke mind virus, perpetuated by the Anti-Christ, in order to safe guard humanity's future.

I wish I was making this up.

The more simple explanation is that the current government in power is over exposed in their AI investment. The normal conservative mainstream media was already doing a great job of propagandizing older populations.

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