- cross-posted to:
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- technology
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- technology
Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning “to find things on the Internet.” Soon, Google might just tell you what’s on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won’t show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.
This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.
With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it’s only the start of Google’s plans for AI search.
Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It’s launching as an opt-in feature via Google’s Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far.
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How many cases of “You should eat at least one small rock per day” AI bullshit does Google think is acceptable for production deployment?
More than zero, which is too many for my taste.
Dear Google,
Literally no one wants this.
Nope. Plenty of people want this.
In the last few years I’ve seen plenty of cases where CS undergrad students get stumped if ChatGPT is unable to debug/explain a question to them. I’ve literally heard “idk because ChatGPT can’t explain this lisp code” as an excuse during office hours.
Before LLMs, there were also a significant amount of people who used GitHub issues/discord to ask simple application usage questions instead of Googling. There seems to be a significant decrease of people’s willingness to search for an answer regardless of AI tools existing.
I wonder if it has to do with weaker reading comprehension skills?
I think it’s simply that getting a direct answer is easier than reading different forums with different views and come up with your idea. That doesn’t mean people want google search to stop searching. We have gemini, if I want to use gemini I can go to gemini. I don’t get why everything has to be AI. We can have multiple tools, not everything out there is a nail.
Somehow I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion here.
I dislike a direct answer to things as it discourages understanding. What is the default memory allocation mechanism in glibc malloc? I could get the answer sbrk() and mmap() and call it a day, but I find understanding when it uses mmap instead of sbrk (since sbrk isn’t numa aware but mmap is) way more useful for future questions.
Meanwhile, Google adding a tab for AI search is helpful for people who want to use just AI search. It doesn’t take much away from people doing traditional web searches. Why be mad about this instead of the other true questionable decisions Google is doing?
Technofascists really benefit from certain kinds of information being inaccessible…
fascists really love LLM’s. like ridiculously in love with them. it’s where all their ‘art’ comes from. it’s made of the shallow aesthetics with no interiority they love so much. plus it doesn’t really require articulating your desires much, or having artists.
To borrow Alex Jones’ term - it is information warfare. Train people to accept the outputs of LLMs, attack media literacy (in conjunction with the fact that public schools in the US spent ten years not teaching children how to read), and hide actual sources.
You can have your LLM trained to weasel around the fact that the chattel slavery of black Americans was the primary cause of the Civil War, or falsely represent science surrounding gender and sexuality (they’re explicitly tuning Grok on this).
You don’t have to worry about subversive messages on war or women in your “AI” generated “Ghibhli” film. Have all the fun space faring of Star Wars, without the prequel geopolitics everyone hated until they saw it happen.
yeah. letting silicon valley build the sword with which to slay the dragon Truth was really some ‘neon genesis evangellion’ grade bullshit. posadism hasn’t failed in this timeline, though. fingers crossed.
I’m stoned so:
The technocrats (Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc) are SEELE. Musk is Gendo - ie, at the table but rogue (and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with a planet full of Yue/Rei’s) Thiel doesn’t trust Musk, so Vance is like his Kaji. (Misato is like literally a Freud caricature of a woman, so we can make her a couch to fit the whole sexual ethos)
COVID was the second impact. The angels are attendant disasters that go with it and things like climate change etc.
Luigi is Kawori, a gorgeous bisexual twink who is being crushed by the system.
The American people are Shinji, paralyzed under stress and trauma. Asuka is a bunch of other countries, being very angry at Americans for not doing shit while not really coping with their own problems.
Rei is obviously the internet/technology.
The globalists have been priming us for this information the entire time! Pre programming! Please buy my protein power.
oh shit, im actually out of protein powder. will it help me brain good? make dicks hard? give me the ability to levitate? is it made of cat litter and post-industrial fracking sand?
They did that long before AI.
Google, Apple and plenty others have regular meetings with defense people to accomodate them.
No surprise Eric Schmit left Google to form a defense company since some employees there had a consciense and didn’t like working on killer drone programs.
I’m decrepit enough to remember pre-Google web, with competing search engines. Bring back webrings!
sometimes you just gotta ask Jeeves
The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.
Please! We need more competition for Google.
Why is everything shit
Capitalism. Next question…
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Can we have one thing that is just doing ok?
Government - fucked.
Education - fucked.
Healthcare - fucked.
Environment - fucked.
Housing - fucked.
Societal and Social Cohesion - fucked.
Wealth Inequality - fucked.
Personal Technological Autonomy - fucked, and under continuous attack.
Technological Enshittification - Running like gangbusters. So really - fucked.
Damn, someone give me some kind of ladder to climb out of this pit of despair.
Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.
Excellent point!
They also flow from corruption (regulatory capture/failure to enforce anti-trust and other consumer-protection law). It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
Nintendo, when chasing developers of emulators and modders, uses regulatory mechanisms. IP is such a mechanism initially. Intended to protect the little guy from big bad corporations.
It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
It’s both of course. Only time flows in one direction and never the other.
(and reinforces it)
No.
The ladder has been privatized.
You get the greased pole.
I know it isn’t much, but services like mastodon, lemmy, kbin, friendica, Peertube, etc have shown me there is connected pushback.
Tilde communities have given me something smaller scale to focus on.
The heck is tilde??
Text explaination. My ADHD brain doesnt have the patience for a video when I just want to know the answer and move on.
https://machaddr.substack.com/p/the-tildeverse-a-brief-overview
The https://tildeverse.org is an online community comprising several servers, known as tilde communities, where users can engage in a wide variety of activities that harken back to the early days of the internet. The term “tilde” refers to the Unix/Linux tradition of using
~(the tilde symbol) as shorthand for a user’s home directory. Each tilde community is typically hosted on a Unix-based system, and these servers provide access to shell accounts and a range of tools to help users communicate, collaborate, and explore computing in a text-based, terminal-driven environment.
Don’t forget about housing! Can’t even have shelter from the elements without paying through the nose to some rent-raising billionaire or giant corporation…
Updated! :)
Every civilization rises and falls. We’re on the down slope ATM. Sorry. The 80s and 90s were pretty nice in America!
That feel when the Matrix actually called it
I’m from India so two more things to add to the list
Air - fucked.
Cleanliness - megafucked.
Problems exist, but there’s never been a safer time to be a homosapien on Earth. A book called Abundance helped me gain a little perspective in these gloomy days.
Thanks, I’ll check it out, though it’s going to take more than motivational books to pull the US out of the current nosedive…
safety because more people are alive? but also most dangerous because more people die daily than at any other time
Also Homo Deus.
And yet, resistance seems very weak…
That’s weird – we water our soil with nutrients like “there’s no point in voting”, “they’re all out to get us”, “politicians are shit”, “nothing changes”, “governments are bad”.
I wonder why people haven’t been motivated to fight. Whenever they express faith in our leaders, or institutions, or have any positivity, we’re quick to shut them down. But still.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Yes. There are many texts written on this since start of writing, some are written down from what was carried in word before that since start of speaking.
Time to turn inside. Whatever around you gets fucked, essentially no one can order you “be miserable”. If this one thing gets fixed a hundred percent your way, the rest is just a question of what you can do and how much of that you are willing to do
But does it seem a very long road to become fully in control of own interiority.
I did not come up with this on my own, just picked if up from someone else, but can’t argue with it
thinking google is about offering you a quality search at this point is like thinking facebook is about improving your social experience. they both started like that and that’s how they hooked people up. but they have their own interests now. those interests revolve around affecting how people act and think. one central thing they need to do to fulfil those interests is controlling what people see and know… and that’s very hard to do when this pesky external content generated by other that is hard to control gets into way…
I am no longer feeling lucky
Wait, google does searches now too? Wow they have a service for everything.
Would this be the same AI that spits out incorrect summarys or just flat out gets data incorrect constantly? What could possibly go wrong by making that the ONLY way to look for things going forward. Fucking morons.
I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.
I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.
Yup. No problem though. In the future AI can just add the now very real town to you AR eyeballs brought to you by Chipotle Exxon and T mobile.
No, this will be the AI that ignores your content and just spits out sponsored content. AI doesn’t really have to be involved much, but if it is, Google doesn’t have to pay up when you file a class action lawsuit for misleading content because they can say “It’s not our fault, thr AI did it.”
The future is coming and it sure looks like garbage. I have long since left Google behind.
It’s been a long time I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for basic stuff (which let’s be honest, more than 80% is just a simple query to find a certain area of some website, like “Firefox download Windows”, “Discord site status”, “Microsoft office pricing” etc.). If I want to search something more related to my own language or recent events in my county, Google is a must, but that’s like 10% of all my search engine usage. I don’t really need Google to know about the other 90%.
I had to ditch ddg when they started injecting my vpn’s geoip as a search term in almost every search. It was to the point where I could literally be including an actual city and state as a search term and I would mostly get results for the vpn’s location. Naturally there is no option to disable this behavior.
Startpage is nice though.
Yeah I think most of my searches start with the name of the site I want results from.
This is exactly why I’m working so hard to eradicate the verb “to google” from my vocabulary. I switched to DuckDuckGo (which then started providing AI summaries, but allowed an easy opt-out).
Even better, use the google verb to refer to searching anywhere other than Google and effectively genericide it.
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
startpage. you’re welcome.
it’s also not us owned or based.
Startpage is owned by System1 who are based in LA.
Well you already said I’m welcome, but thank you anyway.
Unfortunately it’s been sold to the US.
well that’s not good :/ sigh
This is my choice
But start page just returns Google and Bing results. If Google stops offering it, then you’re left w/ Bing. Microsoft has its own AI thing going, so if Google kills search, so will Microsoft.
AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.
It’s another tech bubble like the dot com bubble. But at this point, the AI bubble, the crypto bubble, and the capitalism bubble will all crash at the same time as the world economy falls apart and we end up in another global war. I guess the accelerationists that survive will get their wish and see what remains and if it’s the neofuedalist white supremacy utopia they dream of
