Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.
Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.
What came to mind was the New Coke reformation of 1985, which seems like a brilliant idea (in retrospect) only if you imagine it a 5D chess move to get people to panic because the Coke Classic was about to be discontinued. In fact, the marketers of Coca-Cola since admitted they thought they were getting killed by Pepsi and were sincere in their new release, but the company was able to not only recover thanks to responding to public feedback, so they sold Coke Classic, and New Coke and to this day it’s a popular soft drink. (The company still does shit things like employing death squads to keep their offshore workers scared of unionizing, so it’s still a typical large publicly traded multi-national corporation)
Coca-cola marketing didn’t have that kind of foresight, but there’s a tiny chance that some folks at Google have that kind of hindsight, knowing Google could absolutely afford a ploy like willfully goofing up and then recovering with aplomb by listening to the public. It’s also a way to sneak such a ploy past the shareholders by insisting they were sincere in their implementation of AI at the time.
Unlikely, of course. Most of the time the upper management of big companies are glad to just half-ass everything. But it would make a cool movie at least.