Comment by kazinator
3 days ago
Google are doing a massively weird thing with those AI overviews because ... it makes it look like Google's AI capability is poor.
It's understandable that Google can't run every search query through AI, but the hack they pulled in order to make it appear that way isn't delivering value, and looks bad.
That's either idiocy, or else part of some very clever master plan.
Just look at this submissions itself and thread under this topic. People are calling the AI overviews "Gemini".
But when you use the actual Gemini (e.g. free 2.5 Flash, at gemini.google.com), it's immediately apparent that it's in a different league compared to the search overviews.
> but the hack they pulled in order to make it appear that way isn't delivering value, and looks bad
What hack did they pull? It just seems like too small a model to be able answer any non trivial question. Google must be shitting themselves about chatgpt replacing search. They've released such a shoddy product as AI Overviews, it's so often wrong and people are taking what it says as if it's as reliable as their search snippets, which it definitely isn't.
I’ve personally read many people say that AI is worthless when their only exposure to it is through Google search. Just spitballing here, but it almost seems like a deliberate way to buy themselves some more time before needing to transition business models.
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