“I don’t think we should infer from this that we shouldn’t take risks.”
keep looking
Google’s search chief doesn’t want something as annoying as meaningless AI answers to prevent the company from launching immature products.
As CNBC Google search chief Liz Reid reportedly urged employees during an all-hands meeting last week not to think of problems with AI in its core product as a bad thing.
“It’s important that we don’t hold back features just because there may be occasional problems,” Reid told Google staff, “but as we find problems, we fix them.”
Promoted to the leadership position in March, the veteran Google employee joked to employees that they may have “seen stories about putting glue on pizza and eating rocks”; References, of course, to the viral cases of Google’s AI overview feature spitting out nonsense when he asked simple queries. It wasn’t the first time since he took the reins of search that Reid has had to address AI search’s propensity to do nonsense, and we bet money it won’t be the last.
“I don’t think we should infer from this that we shouldn’t take risks,” Reid said during the meeting. “We must take them carefully. We must act with urgency. When we find new problems, we must test extensively, but we won’t always find everything and that just means we respond.”
urgent reminder
Despite those optimistic comments, it is unclear how that urgency is being implemented.
Although the company has reportedly implemented patches and security barriers to fix the problems infecting its AI-generated search results, a few days ago people were still being told they could make pizza with glue (although a few passes today revealed that the company appears to have manually disabled AI responses for that specific query).
When it arrives for CNBCA defensive Google spokesperson said the “vast majority” of AI Overview responses were accurate and that in its own internal testing, the company found problems in “less than one in 7 million unique queries in which AI Overviews appeared.” “.
“As we’ve said, we continue to refine when and how we display AI overviews to make them as useful as possible,” the spokesperson continued, “including a number of technical updates to improve the quality of the response.”
While it appears that AI Answers are responding to fewer queries than before, it is quite bold to not just dismiss evidence of AI Overview’s immaturity as “occasional problems” and seemingly put the onus of beta testing on the public and the Google staff. big.
“Any time you see problems, whether small or large, please archive them,” Reid urged his Google colleagues.
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