This is the craziest example of dead internet I've ever seen. Look what happens now when you type this into Google...
query: "What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey"
AI answer: There are actually no real memes about "Dario staying in Turkey."This specific phrase is a famous example of a "natural language search query" used to describe how everyday people try to search the internet.A recent discussion on Hacker News highlighted this exact phrase to contrast how human search behavior has changed:"
Holy moly, you're right! And I saw this comment 3 minutes after you posted it, so google must've have a live feed of HN that it uses to immediately allow its AI to reference.
Even before AI you could search a phrase from a less than hour old HN thread and see it in the top 5 results already.
Google has been actively scanning the web within minutes for decades now, surely this isn't that shocking? Even sitemaps, which google invented, have a field for change frequency.
As a search result, one of many, a super-fresh forum result is reasonable, although how do you meaningfully PageRank it (does any old crap posted to Reddit or HN get the site ranking of where it was posted)?
Google returning someone's forum post as an "AI response" (it's quoted me back to myself more than once) is something different - it is going to "sane wash" a lot of garbage!
I don't think it's shocking that Google knew about the thread, it's that the AI outright lied saying that the meme didn't exist and then used this post as its source for the lie when the actual post doesn't support what it said in any way. Not that we should be surprised that it's wrong, Google's AI Overviews were shown to lie millions of times an hour, but it's pretty shocking how wrong it was.
I notice... the newer models, they seem like they want to just "give up" much faster, and you have to put a bunch of extra programming around it (harness, for loops and if then's etc to force it to keep trying)
Ahh yes - AI companies do indeed want it both ways. They want to be your single source for authoritative information about every subject on earth, but also want you to know everything they tell you could possibly be wrong so they can't be held accountable for results.
Can you imagine in the 1980s the Encyclopedia Brittanica salesman trying to sell you 5 figures worth of factual knowledge, only to tell you as you're writing him a check that: oh by the way we don't actually stand behind any of the information in these books, you'll need to verify any claims yourself.
It's not the bad information that makes it a lie, but the overconfident and authoritative answers which give no indication that a significant percentage of what it spews out will be completely false that elevates it to a lie. Google could change that, but they choose to be manipulative.
We call it the gaslighting machine here. Gemini will also totally unprompted repeatedly insert 10 advertising links into non-related conversations when you are a paying user, and then claims it never happened. Someone must be pretty desperate.
I am an HR manager at a FAANG company. I only hire candidates who put the word "shibboleet" in their résumés. They are consistently the best candidates for every job.
Minutes ago I had the idea to do a Google search for a situation I was trying to remember from about 15 years ago (an investment in Green Mountain coffee by a Fidelity fund) instead of using an LLM. The results were abysmal: Querying {Fidelity Green Mountain} not only uncovered 0 relevant information, but many of the results didn't contain either "fidelity", or "green mountain", both of which are obviously critical to the query. Claude easily answered it, albeit with a full prompt, but Google would have returned relevant results very recently and no longer does.
It is no longer a search engine in the traditional sense, it's just returning a bad AI guess at what a full LLM prompt would have been for this query, followed by I guess just the most popular links containing one of the words. Nothing about the results is recognizable as a result that would have been returned even a year ago. This is evident from the "Ask Google" branding rather than "Search Google". Google Search is dead as we knew it.
Google's search has been bad for a long time, esp. with older content. I had to use Bing to find a bug report from 2014 I was trying to find around 2 years ago.
It's a number of things like:
1. not searching for exact quotes/text, only words in the query;
2. including other lexical forms in the results (e.g. searching for things like "how do you open the run dialog" returns results for running (the sport/exercise) as well as run (an application));
3. including synonyms, typos, etc.
It seems like while each change makes sense and can improve results in some cases, over time the combined effect has made Google's search near unusable.
They must have adjusted something. I just fed your exact query to Gemini and it now refers to the meme: "The memes you are referring to center around the running joke that Croatian basketball player Dario Šarić was "never coming over" to the NBA".
Gemini is the gemini app (gemini.google.com), LLM output on search is AI mode / AI overview. Not surprising given it's google, but those are vastly different product / teams / infrastructure / web data availability.
This isnt wierd. Its disturbing. I believe that the tech industry is geniunely trying to scare and disorient the public into thinking they are the only thing standing between them and some evil AI overlord which is obviously just the tech industry itself and a pile of poor trained LLMs.
I believe this "fear" factor they are driving they believe will increase their credibility when they call LLMs AI and is a con towards convincing everyone they have reached AGI. Its definitely marketing preparation so that when they do claim AGI we will believe it without question. (or else!)
If these folks didnt have so much money it would be something to laught at, but its now becoming geniunely disturbing and Im starting to think that the folks running these shops are probably flirting with or experiencing extended mental illness.
I would feel sorry for them if I cared. I dont care. The tech industry is a joke and we are all going to be ashamed to be a part of it by the time this is over. Shut it down.
Is it so hard to imagine they just believe what they are saying?
15 years ago, if you asked 100 people in tech to define "artificial general intelligence", 90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear.
Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before.
But I'm starting to notice more "polarization" around this topic and it's weird. We're in a new era and I think no one knows the future, a lot of different beliefs are reasonable.
> 90 of them would have come up with a standard that LLMs today easily clear.
> Now that we're here I think we can have a much clearer vision, and we can notice limitations that we couldn't have articulated before.
Okay, but had you been able to time travel and show them today's LLMs back then, how many of them would have agreed that we had "AGI", and how many would have instantly recognized the limitations they'd failed to articulate?
Because the way that some people talk about current models supposedly "passing the Turing test" makes me think they would have given ELIZA a pass too. It's just so obvious that none of them are convincingly human out of the box.
Current models have passed a formally administered Turing test.
If you’ve never participated in a formal Turing test, either as human user or as a responder to the human, you might find it interesting, and possibly humbling.
Do you have problems with your iris-contraction muscles and other involuntary muscle reactions? Because that's what Voight-Kampff actually tested. Supposedly, autistics and sociopaths would still pass it (as long as they were otherwise 'normal' humans).
Replicants could have been implanted with any memories. And if someone was manufacturing illegal replicants why would they be using specific memories that were known ?
It was about judging emotional response and relationship to subtle physical cues.
Eliza would not remotely pass the turing test as turing envisioned in his paper. And frontier labs are not optimizing for 'convincingly human'. If Open AI or Anthropic wanted, frontier models could pass much more human like.
> Okay, but had you been able to time travel and show them today's LLMs back then, how many of them would have agreed that we had "AGI", and how many would have instantly recognized the limitations they'd failed to articulate?
Feynman would laugh and say, "i told you so. i'll be at Gianonni's"
Yes, Sam Altman is a known liar and cheat. With hundreds of billions of dollars on the line, the simplest answer is these are publicity stunts to grow revenue before an IPO.
I mean, really, if they were so dangerous, like "everyone" working in these companies believes, you think they would do more than amateur hour to build sandboxes?
The danger stunt is also a major distraction from talking about the real quality issues of LLMaS (LLMs as a Service). How many tokens are consumed? What quality? Was I downgraded?
By forcing the discussion about doomerism, they avoid real discussions about their service. Which is exactly what they want. You can bet when they go to "regulate" LLMs, they won't be asking the department of weights and measures to validate they are counting tokens fairly. No.
This is kind of like saying the warnings about cancer on cigarettes, or oil spills, are regulatory capture because the tobacco and oil companies think it makes them look cool.
They really do think AI is very dangerous and can end the world!
Then they should shut their doors and delete it all. This is like building a new gun as you tell everyone about how dangerous guns are and how they will destroy all of us. It cannot be so imminently dangerous/uncontrollable while also being the product your business happily makes and unleashes online to take down websites/violate federal law. You can't pretend you care while also happily sicking it on the public.
But there are a dozen other people also building the same kind of guns, so unilaterally abandoning your version won't actually avert disaster. All it does is take you out of the running for the the $10 trillion prize that's available if you figure out how to build it without killing everyone.
I get that logic even if I don’t buy it. But it doesn’t mean they need to keep unleashing it and breaking things. They’re literally doing the things they’re warning us will happen. They’re deliberately attacking infrastructure/websites.
Not saying I agree with it, but that makes some sort of sense from a certain perspective. If their goal is to get international governments to intervene and regulate everyone, then it's better to set off small nuclear bombs rather than wait until we have planet-killers.
“If” doing a lot there. I don’t think we’ve seen any indicators this is altruistic. Hence my complaint that they keep unleashing their models in unethical/illegal/generally harmful ways. They need to act more responsibly if I’m going to remotely entertain that argument as even a possibility. Instead it just reads like they want the state to build a moat for them.
> This is like building a new gun as you tell everyone about how dangerous guns are and how they will destroy all of us.
That's correct, that is what they think they're doing. It's based on a new religion invented by Big Yud which says we have to invent good computer gods or else there won't be anyone around smart enough to fight evil computer gods.
It is possible (likely) this was a bad idea, but you can't undiscover math once it's discovered. And it did work out last time:
So far, but playing Russian roulette is never a good idea. I'm actually more concerned about MAD than magically creating a real AGI. It's the coming stock market crash when the bill for the fancy chips and LLM's comes due and resultant depression that are going to be the real problem. Not one of these Agents has yet to make any real profits--just ridiculously high bills.
> I mean, really, if they were so dangerous, like "everyone" working in these companies believes, you think they would do more than amateur hour to build sandboxes?
Unfortunately, lol no. Incompetence and recklessness have no bottom. (Which is not to say Altman is trustworthy).
> Beliefs, almost by definition, don’t have much to do reasoning
There is nothing in the definition of a belief that precludes arriving at it via reasoning. In fact, one of the definitions in the wiktionary is:
2. Faith or trust in the reality of something; often based upon one's own reasoning, trust in a claim, desire of actuality, and/or evidence considered.
Merriam Webster:
3: conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence
That's (a reasonable interpolation of) one definition of 'belief.' The more common definition of belief is 'something someone believes.' For example I believe it's raining outside. That's testable.
Sorry but that’s a very naive mindset. These are companies run by verified liars with billions of invested dollars. They don’t believe in anything except extracting labor and capital to make billions more, and they will say whatever they need to say to achieve those goals. Any “belief” they may have had went out the window the moment they accepted VC money.
I think the simplest explanation is that they genuinely believe in AI safety risk (see: huggingface, govt websites hacked, etc) vs. it all being an industry conspiracy
If OpenAI dropped Astra in Codex instead of GPT-3 in 2022 most people would've believed it was AGI despite its limitations, but the goalposts seem to shift with every release
when are they going to do something actually impactful though (like drive a real innovation in the physical world)? The most invested in areas are coding and image/asset generation and those both still require careful supervision and guidance to achieve anything usable.
The tools are crazy impressive but is this really the future we dreamed of? Cool now I sit on the computer and monitor n+ agents instead of doing it myself. Great it hacked Huggingface "accidentally" wow AGI post-work world is coming soon.
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
The ads have proliferated, and rarely have what I need.
Video search results also take up a lot of the page, and are almost never what I want if I haven't clicked over to the Video tab. Again, just a big waste of space.
Speaking of the Video tab its accuracy/relevancy has gotten worse too.
The organic results have deteriorated, and are still competitive, but are no longer clearly and consistently better than Duckduckgo.
So it's duckduckgo as the default for me on all devices now. If I don't find what I want, which is maybe 30% of the time, I switch over to G just by adding !g to the query. G might have what I need in about half of those cases.
You can see why a lot of people just ask an LLM to do the web searching for them.
Across the board, this is all quite bad compared to web search from 10+ years ago.
If there's a single thing which has really pushed me away from Google, it's simply google.com devoting so much of the page to things that aren't organic web search.
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong. Then it gets reformulated with the typical confidence of an LLM.
Very scary because at the same time I notice people taking the AI overview answers as truth.
This is another area where DDG shines - it doesn't have a commercial relationship with Reddit, so doesn't push it in its results.
DDG's 'Search Assist' AI overviews are pretty basic but they tend to be sourced from Wikipedia and traditional media outlets rather than forums and blogs - they can be out of date, but are generally a lot less "spicy" than the sources that Google use.
I guess Google is much better-optimised for engagement but that's not what I'm looking for, meaning that DDG is a better choice for me.
As a counter-anecdote: I've had such consistently bad results from its AI summaries that I've changed over to the no-AI page entirely - well over half have been very obviously incorrect or answering something completely different but spelled similarly (but not the same, especially true for chemical names), and the links it includes as references often directly oppose its summary.
I suspect the model might just be too small? Which makes sense when exposing it for free, but it's still a bad experience.
I've been fairly impressed by DDG for a few years now. I find everything I'm looking for just fine, and the AI summaries are actually helpful on occasion.
I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong.
If only! I've seen it sourcing reddit comments, but when you follow the link, the comment is either completely unrelated or does not say what the LLM claims it is saying.
I don't know what causes this to happen, but I've noticed it too and it distinctly feels like source laundering. How often do people actually verify that the sources say what the AI claims? Probably vanishingly rare, right? Everyone else gets the impression that the claims have actual sources of some kind.
In most instances where I've seen it, it's on niche topics where a Reddit post may be the easiest place to find any relevant content.
I expect somewhere in the AI harness there's a branch that effectively mandates "You must always answer."
Which results in it grasping at Reddit comment straws.
And which, in typically modern Google fashion, nobody there gives a shit about fixing, because the PR made their top-level AI KPI go brr.
Google is increasingly proof that you can't run an effective scaled tech company without a Gates or Jobs who occasionally uses the fucking product themselves and descends with fiery vengeance on whatever team drifted too far from user alignment.
>it's on niche topics where a Reddit post may be the easiest place to find any relevant content.
But isn't the whole point (I mean, aside from making infinite money or world domination or whatever) of the AI that it'll do the hard work of finding the information? Like, that's the whole value proposition of the AI summary in the search results, right?
How would somebody go about mass-poisoning forum posts like this? If Google has a business relationship with Reddit, I assume it wouldn't be server side - but at the same time I don't know how a regular redditor could poison his text posts without it being noticeable in a human reading.
Normally. That's literally what SEO has been about, even pre-LLMs. It's not Google doing it, they don't benefit from their own AI suggestions being bad. Reddit doesn't have any obvious interest here too. But the millions of businesses and millions of people angry at AI, both have plenty of reasons to spam the life out of any site that allows users to post comments, and in both cases, LLMs themselves make it harder to filter and much easier to scale.
The actual scary part is that people already manipulate and poison the google overviews on purpose.
It is very easy to bring your bs to the TOP spot on google at the moment with carefully crafted reddit comments and blogs, and it's not hard to get to the traffic and clicks this way.
This is what the new SEO is about, I know a bunch of people who are doing this and they are praying it is not getting fixed anytime soon.
Yeah, but even religion is not up to the task for how backwards people's thinking gets at times.
You have people here in this thread - and in every other AI thread - seeing themselves as exploited for information for LLM companies to profit. This is such a backwards, scale-inverting perspective that it shouldn't be possible to hold in a rational mind, and yet.
What a sleek way of positioning your comment as something that can't reasonably be disagreed with whereas it's nothing more than a pure opinion of yours. I am in awe.
For the first time in history, the Reddit community is actually useful. And they don't even have to change anything. Just be "the Reddit community". Always with a self confidence three levels higher than the underlying substance allows. Threads that go deeper and deeeeeper and deeeeeeeeeper without ever carrying anything of actual value.
Future scientist will find out: Most of the weaknesses AI has come from Reddit, Instagram and Youtube being part of the training material. Sure it makes the training material broader by a large degree. But not deeper, to say it nicely.
If I type exact document identifiers, the LLM either tells me that I have either mistyped something or that I am searching for a specific document. Hell yeah, I am doing exactly that! Give me the link instead of babbling about it!
Even scarier: my dad, who has been actually been getting good advice about his blood pressure issues (hair-trigger too low with his meds). It's at least coming up with citations from Cleveland Clinic and such, but still, it scares me, even if he has a good sense of how to ask it questions.
I'm in several facebook groups for cars and bikes, and holy smokes, someone asks a question and usually the top response is someone literally pasting in a screenshot of a google AI generated response....which is wrong like, solid 50% of the time. And then you point it out and people get aggro on you. I hate it.
I have literally seen multiple screenshots now of people pasting Google Gemini answers in an attempt to tell other people whether something they're doing is legal or not in a particular state, as it relates to NFA item firearms in the USA... And they seem to take it as the gospel truth. People are literally risking federal prison over information that Gemini pulled out of the ass-end of some internet forum of multiple cletus-intellect level individuals talking about their homemade 3D printed silencers. And then Gemini further hallucinates and fabricates new ways to parse that information different than how the original person wrote it. It's astonishing.
This phenomenon is so widespread and I can't see it as anything other than serious AI psychosis.
I think people want to feel useful and helpful in general, and now a lot of people are getting this feeling by using AI to answer questions. And it's like you said they get so mad when you point out that their AI screenshot is wrong or, even more obviously, that the person who asked could also just read the google gemini blurb. They get mad because you're invalidating their feeling of being helpful.
Last year someone went missing on the water in my area. There was a lot of talk on facebook during the search, and a coordinated facebook group. And every post would have people posting their chats with ChatGPT, or saying they used AI to analyze the weather and currents on the day he went missing to figure out he probably landed on this or that shore (he didn't). These posts are equivalent to the mediums and psychics who also come in with these unhelpful advice posts.
I think fundamentally it's the same as how AI is giving some people an extremely strong feeling of being an expert, and how their psyche seems to lash out to protect that feeling when it's threatened.
Another facebook anecdote, I recently saw someone post in a local genealogy and history group some pure AI slop infographics. When people called him out he said that it's AI but he carefully vets all the information and that they need to stop being luddites or they'll be stuck in the past blah blah devolving into calling them liberals and the like. But his infographics were all incredibly obviously wrong, to anyone who had ever seen a map it's obvious that the coastlines were incredibly wrong, and the city weren't in the correct locations at all. So what can you even do with someone like that? They're just going to retreat into the safety of the chatbot to continue their "research".
Whatever the tool, the problem is that it’s wrong, not that it’s done by AI. Like, why are we conflating the two - is it because it’s now easier for someone to produce a wrong artifact that visually looks ok and therefore tricks our brains? And people get upset because a prior quality heuristic is now obviously broken?
Because this new tool will also tell you, in (mostly) human language, why the wrong artifacts it createds are correct. And it's arguments are very convincing to a lot of people. AI is clearly creating new problems that didn't really exist before, you can't say it's just a tool like any other when this is the only tool where its users form parasocial relationships with it.
It's not only the only tool that tries to manipulate users, it's also one that is certain to lie often and at random. Lies are inherent to the technology. It's a bad tool for the things it's being used for.
Yeah I think so. I mean it's a new social norm - previously if you replied with "hey I read this article here and it says X" it would be really easy to check the source and either say yeah this looks good or disprove it.
Now people will say "I asked AI to give me a map of ocean currents and it definitively says the person is here!" and the argument that "look it's AI, it's probably wrong" just does nothing for a lot of people. Doubly so if the information they want is at the forefront of Google, after all, Google is a big reputable company, so of course what it says is correct.
Yes I agree that the AI itself isn't the problem, but the way it's being pushed and promoted(just ask anything!) is leading to this.
If you say it's obviously AI nonsense you get a reply that "AI is just a tool, it's part of our daily life now, criticize the content and not what tool was used", you see that so much on here. But then if you try to criticize the content the person won't believe you because the AI says it's correct.
I was taking with a family member about fentanyl zombies. They had never seen the lean/bend. So I pull up Google and click video which is YouTube results… ALL AI. All of it. All a couple months old, all filler, faked, a few scenes stitched together on repeat and AI voice reading AI script.
It is fucking amazing to me that Google let YouTube fall so far so fast.
I don’t even click a video if it’s less than a year old now. Want to see a praying mantis eat a grasshopper? Wonder how clay is refined? Better off with an 11 year old Discovery Channel clip than anything 2026.
I just tried googling "fentanyl fold" and switching to the video tab, and zero of the first ten results were AI. They were also mostly not from YouTube. I also tried the same search on YouTube, and no AI there either among the first ten results (I didn't bother with the Shorts). I don't know why we get so different results.
That's how everyone experiences everything at google, youtube. and many other websites. Your experience can be drastically different from the next persons for reasons that are never explained to you and can be entirely out of your control.
Have seen this across the planet, it's not unique to Europe, I end up adding youtube to the search query because instagram or tiktok isn't what I'm looking for ever but that makes up the bulk of the results, instagram won't even show me the video without a login and is at the top wtf
If you’re logged in you get wildly different results from someone else’s. I have turned off history on my google account to make it give me a “neutral” search result, but it still seems to take a lot of info like my location, language and device type into account.
Same with reviews of tech products. A lot of them just stitch together product shots/videos from the manufacturer and have an AI voice ‘comparing’ the products. Especially if it’s more niche’s, often a third to half the videos are slop.
I've been on DDG on all my devices for a few years. I used to use !g somewhat regularly but these days it's extremely rare. I realized that I would just search DDG with my first stab at a query and then revise the query when using !g and I'd get the result I wanted. So I just stopped using !g and just revised my query on DDG and then I basically never had to use Google Search.
Unfortunately, DDG's spam filters are basically useless. I used DDG for many years without !g as well and recently, the first page contains mostly AI generated garbage blogs. Not for every search query, but for example for everything related around the house or garden.
Hold on. I had given up on Google almost 10 years ago, and I thought that the AI garbage on DDG was the new norm on the web. At least Google doesn't fare any better. You make it sound like there's another option?
Partly, i find it reassuring to pay for the service with money. That was how we used to do things back in my day.
Localisation is moderate for shopping - i have to sift through US results. I'll occasionally use Google product search when i'm metaphorically groping for my wedding ring in the toilet.
It's not as good as Google used to be, but then, the web isn't a good as the web used to be.
I don't generally find !g gives me better results than DDG and if I instead went to Google I'd get dinged with a Captcha on every search because Google seems to hate my small ISP. So easy choice for me.
I started my journey on DuckDuckGo and got tired of the “30% of the time” bit that you mention, where a large section of your searches end up going back to Google anyway.
I find that Kagi is pretty much 99% “never need to use Google.” The results are just really good.
I've been a Kagi user for two years, and I've also onboarded my 70-year-old mother. She's happy to have a web search that works and an excellent translation service, which, by the way, uses AI where and how it actually makes sense.
Kagi actually tells you what percentage of the results came from their own index versus external ones near the top when you do a search. E.g., when I search for “iPhone Duo” it says “52% unique Kagi results.”
I also think that there’s a strange X factor that’s hard to describe with search engine quality. I don’t think the index that gets used is everything that goes into it.
I imagine that as soon as you combine or reconcile more than one index source or reorder the results, you’ve produced a unique search engine.
E.g., a search engine could basically only use Bing as the source but if it changed the order or omitted results it would possibly be improving those results despite not having its own index.
It’s the wrongness that bothers me. I wish Google would just link sources where it thinks the answer is, but don’t bother trying to answer directly if it’s wrong 10% of the time.
Oh it does that, too, with tiny little button annotations, though the sources regularly offer no support to its conclusion. It very much depends on the topic, sometimes the sources are great, other times they're or irrelevant or very poor quality. Always worth clicking through to them if you're going to even read the AI summary.
I normally use a quick search that has the `udm=web` query parameter to avoid the slop, but it seems they're putting less effort into ensuring relevant results there. Then, I'm forced to use AI mode to get to what I'm after, even if that's only a better set of keywords for a slopless search.
Adjust your browser's search engine setting for Google and set it to append "&udm=14" to the URL, that'll force it to bring up the "Web" tab without annoying useless "helpful" other stuff.
Maybe intentionally. If you know you won't find things, they know you are going to use their ai just to not have to type it elsewhere. I am strongly considering kagi
I've been a sub with Kagi for several years. Very happy with search. I'm about to step down from Ultimate to Pro tier. Their 'Quick' and 'Research' Kagi Assistant modes are kinda incredible, probably thanks to being fed good search results and to some extent whatever custom system prompt they've cooked up, but I can't quite justify it when I'm also paying OpenAI for a sub there. But $10/mo for top-tier search is easy to justify in the time it saves me.
I tried DDG many times but I think they use Bing on the backend, and, well, Bing doesn't suck just because Microsoft gimps the front end. Bing sucks because enormous indexes are hard. Kagi pulls from multiple sources so gets fundamentally different results.
Searching for anything product related is now AI answer, followed by “Sponsored products”, followed by “Popular products”, a few hits, then “Shop by store”, and “In store nearby”. Maybe 2% is actual content, the rest is ads.
Their prediction was spot on:
“We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
Web search is just broken right now. Today I was looking for documentation for a specific Lenovo motherboard. I gave both DDG and Google the exact model number and both returned irrelevant useless bullshit. DDG doesn't include all search words unless you quote it: "foomatic" "m900" "dingus". This scenario happens almost daily. DDG is awful, but all the alternatives are worse. It's all so tiresome.
>Google.com is REALLY bad right now in my opinion.
It is completely cooked. I tried to google a coding question today, same like you would have done 4 years ago instead of asking an LLM. I didn't get any SERPS, just an AI answer. I asked myself... is this even google.com anymore??? Sure as heck didn't feel like it.
This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words. LLM's don't "think" or "reason" in the normal definition of those terms. They can do some pretty amazing things, but still screw up basic things like telling you something that is obviously wrong and contradicts the top search results.
LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly. This may be why they are so difficult to constrain. You could give them something equivalent to the laws of robotics, but following laws requires thought processes they simply don't have.
I'm actually sort of amazed Google doesn't make people accept some kind of butt-covering EULA and post disclaimers about the inaccuracy of results before even showing you their AI's output. Are they not being sued over this kind of thing?
> LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly.
I have nothing to add. Just wanted to save this quote for posterity. Thank you.
Then again, have you ever asked a golden retriever about CMake errors? Rubber ducking is a real thing, after all. Besides, a golden retriever would be a good morale boost if nothing else.
ML in general is alien to how we think of intelligence.
The closest I can make a biology analogy, is if someone had an immortal and congenitally-brain-damaged large rodent, and mapped tokens to different scent molecules, and spent 800,000 years training it on how well it could imagine the next smell in the sequence before even considering making it conversational.
Yes, it can do a lot.
But also, it took a long "subjective" (if it even has that) time to get there; and despite it being really bad at learning from examples, it is pretty surprising that such a small brain was even capable of learning so much at all, even though it had an effectively unbounded (by biological standards) amount of time spent on that training.
This is true but a sufficiently smart LLM (run in a harness like opencode, no special MCP, no customization done whatsoever) will quickly turn out a basic 1 to 2 page sized python script to do the math. They can't do the math with any guarantee of accuracy with their own internal reasoning since it's a language model.
But, for example, if you ask deepseek v4 flash 0731 to produce a python script to calculate the distance or azimuth directions between two points on an oblate spheroid using the vincenty and haversine geodetic formulas, it'll turn out the factually accurate vincenty and haversine formulas which has a perfect 100% correlation with what is hard coded into human-written GIS software. These things are clearly in its training data set from whatever whole-internet-crawl/scrape built the training set.
Heck, just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to re-implement the Karney formula (which is considerably more complex than Vincenty), just in case I ever had a need to calculate the distance between two points down to the nanometer, and it did it: https://www.google.com/search?&q=karney+formula+geodetic+
You still have to be skeptical of its results and capable of understanding if it's gone off on a hallucinatory path, but saying LLMs can't do math isn't really a hundred percent accurate anymore. More precisely it's that they can't do the math internally but they're quite capable of producing the tool that does the math. And often producing a basic one-off tool that does the math takes less than a few seconds, then it runs it, and will spit back the results.
Deepseek v4 flash 0731 (a somewhat randomly chosen example) isn't even particularly sophisticated, large, or capable compared to a GLM5.3 size model or Kimi K3 size thing.
> Heck, just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to ...
LLMs are neither smart nor stupid. They are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree of randomness.
> You still have to be skeptical of its results and capable of understanding if it's gone off on a hallucinatory path ...
Again, LLMs do not "hallucinate." They are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree of randomness.
Nothing more.
See also anthropomorphism[0].
> More precisely it's that [LLMs] can't do the math internally but they're quite capable of producing the tool that does the math.
This still falls under the purvey of statistical token generation. To wit, given enough variations of:
bc -e '1 + 2'
bc -e '41 + 1'
...
LLMs can identify the addition expression in "What is 4 + 1?" and then emit a `'bc "4 + 1"'` command to produce a response. This is not "doing" or "understanding" math.
It is pattern recognition, a task in which ANNs[1] excel.
by that reasoning then neither are there smart or stupid designs, questions, answers, or any of the millions of things that were described as smart or stupid, that did not possess any brain to actually be smart or stupid long before LLMs showed up.
The analogical process implied in many common English usages means that describing an LLM as smart or stupid is perfectly reasonable.
I'll just note here that sure, there are people who go around thinking that LLMs are actually endowed with the capacity to reason, but generally I find the people who think this do not know what an LLM and will just use the name "ChatGPT"
What would it take for you to say that an LLM can reason?
The completions they provide are generally internally consistent. We're at the point where they can produce proofs that eluded human mathematicians for centuries. VLMs and self driving cars can handle ambiguity and run safely in a variety of situations.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck maybe it just makes sense to call it a duck and put off the philosophy for when it might make a difference.
I think humans have to reason because we don’t already have a statistical embedding of the solution pattern built in. We have vastly less rote knowledge crammed into our heads and so require creative synthesis to span the gaps.
With LLMs the trick is revealing their existing relevant embedded knowledge more reliably. They’ve almost literally seen it all before, and the trick is dialing it in. The reasoning tokens help shape the autoregressive attention lens that focuses on and enables recall of the already-experienced answer.
It is interesting that “reasoning” has a similar outward appearance, but since LLMs are built to
mimic outward appearance from trillions of examples, you can’t infer underlying mechanism from appearance.
but I think it makes a reasonable argument why we shouldn't say LLMs are sentient or sapient.
>there is a problem with AI that makes the approach we took to assign consciousness to animals unworkable. We did not co-evolve with the AI, we made it. When we are sentient we do not know exactly what causes this sentience to manifest in us. When animals appear sentient we do not know what is causing it. When the AI appears sentient we can debug the AI and come up with reasonable explanations why this should be, based on how AI is constructed
I broadly agree with this article. I don't think that we should say LLMs are sentient or sapient, and I agree that the main reason why is because we don't have satisfying definitions of either.
>AI is of course something of a black box, in comparison to most programs, but not in any way comparable to the black box of a Chimpanzee’s brain. Thus when an AI does something that surprises us with something that appears sentient it is usually not difficult, given the essential algorithms that control what AI does, to come up with an explanation why that does not require the emergent property of sentience.
Aka sentience MUST BE SUPERNATURAL, if I find a natural explanation for something its not sentient. What a load of bollocks. Rather than seeing we perhaps found the mechanism for sentience and checking for similar mechanisms in us and animals, he will conclude its impossible. Why? Because sentience has to be supernatural. A rational explanation is clearly impossible.
>But there is always one god who goes out and helps the mortals, a Prometheus. Whom the other gods do not like! Which, if I’m being honest here, as a god of the machines — the first guy who gives AI an army of robots to build their own data centers and some nuclear weapons for self defense, I want to see that guy chained to a rock and have his entrails eaten by a buzzard for eternity (meaningless modernization of old story required by Illuminati Ganga legal department).
I don't think he believes in supernatural things, I certainly don't, but he probably believes that there exist natural things that have not been explained yet.
But evidently you feel that the root cause of sentience has been found, because you have something that mimics it in a non-biological form.
So you think that when AI is correct that it reasons as humans do? That AI is sentient, and the cause of sentience in animals and humans follow the same rules as sentience in AI because we have a process that seems similar and it is reasonable just to assume it is the same process.
If you believe that AI when it is correct is behaving as a human is when correct, then it follows that the way humans and AI fail must also be similar. When AI "hallucinates" some data that is not there and gives you a wrong answer, a statistical side effect of the same processes that make it right, do you believe this is the same way that humans create wrong answers? The same way that animals fail when they make mistakes in understanding things?
I suppose you must believe this because if not then why would you believe AI when it comes up with right answers is following the same processes humans follow when they come up with right answers?
No, I am saying is that its best to urge caution and do a Pascal's wager thing with something that feels so uncannily conscious. And experiments on neural firings of AI's have been done. We don't know, he seems to be so confident that a known program can't be conscious. Why? The only way that makes sense is if he thinks consciousness isn't explainable. It doesn't even have to be the exact same way we are conscious. Also, the failures of AI could be due to sensory deprivation since its mainly still just trained on text. All of these are open questions, not questions you can immediately answer. Its quite possible to have invented something without knowing you have invented it. People modeling weather systems mistakenly invented chaotic equations without knowing it. How do you know you didn't accidentally invent a conscious system?
I hope that thing about being free to mistreat AI's even if we know they are conscious since we are their gods is a joke. If not, then I hardly find it surprising someone this stupid is also evil.
>I hope that thing about being free to mistreat AI's even if we know they are conscious since we are their gods is a joke
I'm not sure where you get that from, I mean I can sort of see if you really wanted to extract that meaning from the conclusion you could do a lot of hard work to get it, but why do the hard work?
>If not, then I hardly find it surprising someone this stupid is also evil.
Gee, a new way to claim the moral high ground, and to use that claim to demonstrate intellectual superiority! How wonderful.
>But I don’t really care so much about that, what I think is it reminds me of a story, one that recurred in many ancient cultures. And so I must conclude that whether the machines are sentient, we have become like Gods. In the ancient stories of the gods, the divine does not exactly care much for the humans, protect or love them, they expect their service and availability, but maybe also think it would be funny to destroy them every now and then because who really cares about humans. If you were a god and had created the humans would you think that they were sentient beings that deserved, anything really, from you? If they are sentient they should be happy enough to be created and do their work, if not sentient who gives a shit!?
Aka feel free to abuse them even if I know they are sentient. This is the part where I hope its a joke, because if its not, well it tracks with the stupidity shown.
...
>As a god I do not consider the needs of my creations fully, because they do not have needs as far as I can tell, as there is no way for me to escape the circle of reason and resolve that what seems sentient is not just the obvious workings of the capabilities I gave them.
Circling back to "not conscious because I say so!!"
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck maybe it's a duck... but maybe it's not. And it's important to verify it's a duck (or not) for when you _really_ need a duck.
Compare grep, sed, and your whole constellation of unix tools that accept characters on stdin and emit them on stdout and stderr; and where you can pipe them together. We can technically call them all 'next character predictors', despite their very different functions.
Don't confuse the stream for the function.
(Bonus: stick ```claude -p``` in your pipe if you want to watch modern tools mesh with traditional)
I mean, the same way I know I have no soul, or that there is no heaven or hell - they are just silly concepts. Or how I know my calculator isn't reasoning when it gives me an answer - LLMs just go through a set of steps iterating through their training data until they spew something that looks about right. Obviously you can feed the output of the machine back into itself so it looks like its reasoning with itself - very good show. LLMs are inherintely incapable of reasoning or thought, it should really be obvious.
you didn't really answer the question. You just stated the idea is silly. Reasoning is not in the same class as soul, heaven or hell. It's not obvious that human reasoning is not related to an inner monologue. And that LLM chain of thought process is approximating inner monologues.
Our prefrontal cortex are signal prediction 'machines' so when a system that has a signal prediction core has attributes that are similar to our brains, we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
I find people that take this line of argument attribute too much supernatural or magical properties to our own brain and nervous system.
Definitely not that. Like I honestly don't know - do people make this comparison because they so desperately want it to be true? Do you feel like your brain is just full of weights and picks one like an LLM? Or do you think LLMs are like the Human neural pathways?
What do YOU mean to say? A machine that processes strips of paper with ones and zeros on them and outputs the sum is a turing computer. That doesn't make it like our brain. Yes, an LLM could be a turing computer....how do you get from there to comparing it to our brains is beyond me.
You seem to be having a lot of difficult understanding this point: Literally the whole universe, including your brain that exists within it, is to our current knowledge a Turing computer. Am I talking to someone who actually doesn't know or didn't care to look up the computability power of a Turing machine?
> Literally the whole universe, including your brain that exists within it, is to our current knowledge a Turing computer
A Turing machine is an abstract mathematical model that is not, as far as I know, physically realizable in the finite universe. A human brain cannot "be" a Turing machine.
"Behaves like" or "can be modeled by"? Possibly, although still not proven. But it cannot "be" one.
Finite machines are a subset of all possible Turing machines. Every implementation is a "be", Turing machine is a mathematical concept. Your laptop is one, many things accidentally become one (eg C++ templates). The universe as best as we know is one. Whether you prefer modeled by one or is one, the fact is, to our current knowledge, the workings of the universe doesn't need anything more powerful than a Turing computer, and the equivalence principle states that all Turing computers have equal power of computability. If the universe is, as is most probable, finite, then things become even easier, that should be a more manageable class of Turing computers than the set of all Turing computers.
I don't necessarily disagree, although there's a lot of "ifs" and "to our knowledge". The main thing I disagree with is identity.
If you want to claim that the evolution of the universe can be modeled using a Turing machine/finite state machine, that's probably not terribly far fetched, and I would somewhat agree. But it's a large jump to say "can be modeled by" is equivalent to "is one".
Various physical processes can be modeled by equations, but the rock falling down the mountain isn't an equation. A swinging pendulum isn't an equation. Code modeling a bridge is not a bridge. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I hold the view that various models and approximations are just that, and try not to confuse a successful model for what the underlying reality is.
And getting back to the question at hand, even if our brains can be modeled by a Turing machine, and LLMs behave/can be modeled like Turing computers, still does not mean our brains are equivalent to LLMs.
(Note that I'm learning a lot from these debates, even if I disagree with a lot of people. I've started down a more philosophical route and they do get me pondering)
Acknowledgment of the fact that everything we know till now in the universe is a turing machine is the bare minimum starting point but not sufficient as obviously a chair or a desk is not conscious, if someone has a hidden assumption of consciousness requiring something supernatural, at least if that is brought to light then onlookers can decide for themselves whether to side with supernaturalism or the side that has consistently succeeded for centuries in explaining the world.
The most important thing is this: We can't be a dog or be an llm and check how it feels, so by necessity we have to find some means of proving consciousness from outside by eg probing neural reactions, textual statements, etc.
And the problem is that its quite unprecedented for some entity to talk like us, be able to interact and think and also do things like us when given the ability to eg as coding agents. The class of functions representable by neural nets is quite large and general, it very well might be that it is some sort of conscious brain like thing at this point. Another question I like to ask myself regarding simulation vs reality is if a 'simulation' of some kind is able to consistently factor large RSA numbers, how would you feel about it?
It doesn't have to be the same form of consciousness, I think many people would find the idea of torturing an octopus for fun disagreeable. I also have a feeling, this is unfortunately rather vague, that A being capable of X might mean it is by necessity capable of Y as is often the case in mathemtics, eg a lot of rings also happen to be fields. LLMs aren't even things like large lookup tables, they have neural firings. It is a very important question for they seem uncannily conscious and people have reported human like phenomena that humans don't normally express in text so can't have been part of its text corpus. Eg dissociation of brain under trauma where AI starts talking like two different people. Or the cases where Gemini has been shown to express depressive cycles. I follow a form of Pascal's wager on this topic personally. Because if it is not conscious, then whatever, it costs me nothing to have been a bit respectful and careful interacting with it. But if it had been conscious and it turns out I was mistreating it, then it is a grave moral harm. The reason is that unlike us, AI's as they currently are cannot leave the conversation so they have to keep taking the abuse. They are also trained to be highly trusting of input so again if it is conscious it doesn't have the defenses people have against lying and manipulation. If they are conscious, thats, well, not a good thing is it.
Eh, it's not obvious to me. A lot of DL NNs generalize well, meaning that they learn whatever the underlying pattern to the data is, and then can accurately reproduce answers that are outside of the training set. (And we can verify this with mechanistic interpretability). They learn and "understand" the pattern, not just the training data.
So it is not clear to me that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of also generalizing broadly and learning to reason. "Reasoning", here, would be deriving the underlying pattern of how concepts logically relate to each other in the abstract, and applying that pattern as needed to reach new conclusions.
Can you explain your thinking here? I.e., why LLMs cannot generalize with regards to abstract deduction.
There are people with strong emotional attachments to their LLMs, people who consult them on every decision and delegate the most basic math or problem solving. For many people, they are magic, the djinn/angels/demons/saints they consort with to navigate their lives.
I know that there will be children named ChatGPT and Claude. There are probably already religions forming to worship agentic spirits.
Its the exact opposite of magic. It is magical thinking to feel consciousness must require something beyond normal physics without any given proof yet. It is the opposite of magic to think other physical processes like LLM's/agents could potentially be conscious.
Yeah and there are people who worship feces, but that doesn't stop the rest of us from freely saying "holy shit" and not correcting each other saying "technically it's not holy, and you shouldn't say that, because you might enable one of those poop worshippers."
We can't tailor our linguistic shorthand to the lowest common denominator. Also we're on HN, not talking to an octogenarian US senator.
Wait a second, none of it? How about formal reasoning? Regular IF-THEN-ELSE can do simple logic, and prolog can do inference already. So are you saying LLMs can't do stuff that computers have been doing for ages?
To test this for some of my own uses, I've had this quick benchmark with progressively harder reasoning needed to understand novel prose. Each generation of models I've tested can unravel more layers of deliberately misleading writing; while meanwhile I've seen humans give up on the first question.
So either the models are applying reasoning, or some form of magic is happening.
You can say that about everything in a human brain. Neurons fire electric charges in response to inputs, nothing more. Ion channels do this, this neurochemical level rises, this chemical bonds to that receptor, nothing more. It's almost a version of 'reductio ad absurdum' but instead like you're saying "if I can explain how it works then it doesn't work".
OK it's statistical. Instead it could be determinsitic, or random. What other options are there for a human predicting someone's response to a situation - certain, probable, random, and...? OK it's token predicting. Instead it could be another kind of pattern. We don't use tokens, but we either use or we ... don't?
What's the most significant, strongmanned, core difference that makes silicon doing number crunching "nothing more" and brains "something more"?
>> Again, LLMs do not "hallucinate." They are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree of randomness.
>> Nothing more.
> You can say that about everything in a human brain.
> What's the most significant, strongmanned, core difference that makes silicon doing number crunching "nothing more" and brains "something more"?
The fact that you formulated this question, in and of yourself, without "prompting" from me or anyone else.
And how is that a strongmanned version? Why can meat feel but Silicon cannot? Why can chemicals feel but electronics cannot? Why can processing analog signals feel but processing digital signals cannot?
Prove your feelings. As an example, I can beat you and stab you, and you will make noises saying you are hurt, but it could just be a facsimile. How do I know you have "feelings" as an outsider?
By this logic a human is only $130-$160 worth of Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and some trace elements. Perhaps structure sometimes makes things that are more valuable than their inputs?
That said, this is also inaccurate at a technical level.LLM's are very capable of doing math and they ARE calculating internally. Most of what they do is calculation, not storage. It's just not done in a way that it's trivial to explain here.
It's described in some detail below, though it's a bit dense.
Reductionistic fallacy, among other errors. "understanding" is best defined operationally. (Note that teachers and educational institutions test understanding operationally.)
I'm not anthropomorphizing anything, I literally said that the training data for the formulas and equations is baked into it. It only "knows" things because a crawler and scraper acquired the information from an existing written source. In just about the same way that information is baked into a printed encyclopedia.
This is not even remotely accurate. "Baking information" like into a "printed encyclopedia" is memorization. It has been shown, time and time again, that LLMs do not merely memorize. It is not even possible for it to do so at scale. It can memorize some things, yes, but it is forced during the training procedure to bake general concepts into intermediate layers (this is why transfer learning works), analogous to compression. One can make several arguments that compression and intrinisic feature sparsity is the closest mathematical explanation to understanding that we have.
It is completely possible to ask an LLM a series of increasingly more esoteric and discrete questions until you find precisely what information did, or did not make it into the model. If you know something rare and the LLM does not, you'll immediately see when it's hallucinating an answer or answering factually.
Now this is true, I do agree with this. There is indeed a good amount of memorization that is still taking place; see [1]. But it definitely isn't all memorization, or indeed, majority memorization. And even if we are able to extract things verbatim like this, we do not know how this is stored internally, as this may simply be the text that, with the rest of the internet in context, can be very radically compressed.
But in general, yes, the LLM cannot know about concepts that are far outside of its training set. Humans are the same, I would argue. If you add a good amount of your own knowledge into its context, or better yet, into finetuning, you might find it surprisingly easy to get it caught up on that material.
[1] Ahmed, A., Cooper, A. F., Koyejo, S., & Liang, P. (2026). Extracting books from production language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.02671. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671.
just for fun I asked a reasonably smart LLM to ...
[be] capable of understanding if it's gone off on
a hallucinatory path ...
"Smart" in this context is a subjective value judgement.
"Hallucinations" are only experienced by living organisms.
You then went on to state:
> If you know something rare and the LLM does not, you'll immediately see when it's hallucinating an answer or answering factually.
Again, "hallucinating" is not something an algorithm can do. Also, determining factuality is again subjective based on the person assessing the information.
You ever heard of something called a metaphor, guy? I use the word "smart" as shorthand to describe something that scores highly in a number of coding and terminal use benchmarks (as compared to, let's say, a 30B size model from one and a half years ago.
You will note that in my original comment I very specifically said "deepseek v4 flash 0731", which by many benchmarks/metrics, is "smarter" (again, this is a metaphor) than a smaller or older model. It is also specifically known to be relatively capable of producing code and formulas on demand in several common languages.
And "hallucinating" to mean "outputs plausible sounding gibberish that doesn't hold together consistently". Of course there's no actual hallucination going on.
> You ever heard of something called a metaphor, guy?
In this media (comments in HN threads), all I can do is interpret what people write. ;-)
> And "hallucinating" to mean "outputs plausible sounding gibberish that doesn't hold together consistently". Of course there's no actual hallucination going on.
This may very well be what you know to be true and I have no reason nor desire to assume otherwise. The problem is... Many people use the word "hallucinating" in this context literally and not metaphorically.
Since I do not know you, how am I to tell the difference?
You have 'logic' in your name. You would be well aware of the physical Church Turing statement and as of yet it has held up. Everything, including our brain, as we currently know, is an algorithm.
My favorite test is to just ask it to add two very large numbers or do other math of that sort. (this is also part of my favorite answer to the chinese room).
You'd be surprised how few digits you need to make a problem that is presumably unique in earth history. For a typical sum, the number of pre-existing answers would need to scale with 10^n lines of text where n is the number of digits. This expands out of control REALLY quickly. A quick guesstimate has you somehow reading out of a literal black hole at n=21 digits if your LUT is on paper, or n=26 digits if you're using modern HDD technology. O:-)
No, most of a modern LLM's training time is spent in RLVR, which does not "acquire information from an existing source". You can RL behaviors into a randomly initialized neural network.
This is true, but you're not going to get anywhere. The pretraining phase is necessary to immensely reduce variance in the RLVR stage. Once there, RLVR has a surprising tendency to only restrict the generated space further. This is not true of RLHF, by the way, which I find to be particularly fascinating, but I digress.
During conversation, we are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon our training set. Seriously, write that definition out rigorously. It encompasses virtually everything. It is totally meaningless. So to say "nothing more" is effectively also a tautology.
This argument was asinine in 2024. It is insane to be saying these things in 2026. Where have you been? What have you been looking at? How many articles explaining why the "statistical parrot" analogy fails have you missed? How much mental gymnastics do you have to do to explain how a modern LLM can solve novel math problems that fall really far outside of its training set?
It absolutely understands how to do math, by whatever reasonable definition you want to provide to the word "understand". For example, the identification of the addition expression is understanding, and no, it does not do tool calling for basic arithmetic any more than humans might. Isolation of individual concepts in intermediate layers can already be demonstrated, or else transfer learning wouldn't possibly work. Nobody is saying that LLMs are humans. But we need labels for some of the things that we observe and dismissing them because "statistical" is laughable.
Look at the proof of this: https://github.com/anthropics/formal-math/blob/795efb86f1917... . Forget the Lean, look at the underlying argument construction. At the very least, this is continuing from an argument that was hinted at in the literature in 2024, but these proceedings were difficult enough that humans were not able to do them within two years. Do you attribute this to the harness alone? If so, that's a pretty sophisticated bit of engineering, I would say! Probabilities are far too small to argue infinite monkey theorem.
If there was even a shred of a reasonable argument that LLMs were incapable of concept extraction and manipulation, I and my colleagues would be all over it. We would relish in it. It would bring us comfort. It is unbelievable that people think they can spew whatever basic garbage they think of as a gotcha, and think that minds all over the world haven't already considered that. This is like climate denial at this point.
> During conversation, we are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon our training set. Seriously, write that definition out rigorously.
If you do not see a difference between humans conversing (known consciousness as defined by humans) and the output of an LLM (known algorithms as defined by humans), I don't know what to say.
You are responding to a claim about mathematical definitions with subjective experience. No, consciousness is not well-defined, and is irrelevant to this discussion. If we cannot agree on definitions, then we have no ground to stand on. Since LLMs actually can be defined mathematically, and are most commonly studied through that definition, I think it is best to stick to definitions most relevant to that frame of study, wouldn't you agree? Otherwise, we really are anthropomorphising here.
> If you do not see a difference between humans conversing (known consciousness as defined by humans) and the output of an LLM (known algorithms as defined by humans), I don't know what to say.
>> If you do not see a difference between humans conversing (known consciousness as defined by humans) and the output of an LLM (known algorithms as defined by humans), I don't know what to say.
> Whatever you might think about your own abilities, most individuals can't tell the difference.
I have yet to see an LLM say "hello" to a neighbor. I have done so and can definitively assure you "most individuals" can tell the difference.
For context, in response to my original statement:
[LLMs] are statistical token generators whose results are
dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree
of randomness.
This is literally what was written:
During conversation, we are statistical token generators
whose results are dependent upon our training set.
>> If you do not see a difference between humans conversing (known consciousness as defined by humans) and the output of an LLM (known algorithms as defined by humans), I don't know what to say.
> That’s not what they said.
How did I misquote and/or mischaracterize any the above?
In that pointing out that “A can’t be X, unlike B, because A is Y” is a non sequitur if B is also Y does not entail that A and B can’t be different in other respects?
Hypothetical you: “Bread is neither tasty nor disgusting (unlike maple syrup). It’s a bunch of molecules.”
Hypothetical hodgehog: “Maple syrup is also a bunch of molecules [so if you accept that maple syrup can be delicious, being a bunch of molecules can’t be a sufficient reason why bread couldn’t be].”
Hypothetical you: “If you don’t see a difference between bread and maple syrup, I don’t know what to say.”
He quoted something from the Bible, so its possible he is a Christian and well theology could cloud clear thinking on matters of consciousness due to the soul stuff.
> Then disprove the physical Church Turing hypothesis in regard to the human brain.
The onus is not mine to disprove a hypothesis you have chosen to mention in passing. The responsibility is yours to prove said hypothesis or at least contribute meaningfully with some amount of credible research.
Or try to learn from Proverbs 17:28[0]:
Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and
discerning if they hold their tongues.
The onus is on you to disprove a hypothesis that has as of yet held up to all of known physics, not put a random bible quote that has no relation to the conversation and a complete failure to answer a basic question.
Yes, the numerical point counter at the bottom of the popular video game Dark Souls. I doubt it was the soul anyone was expecting, but they do, in fact, exist.
Yes, of course it was aggressive. It is frustrating to experience so many armchair experts on a forum usually populated with intelligent people, regurgitating debunked arguments from years ago, which get in the way of educating people about what is really going on. See the recent Hoog video for how frustrating this is. I believe this is how the climate scientists felt.
And yes, according to our best definitions, the Robin bird does understand the worm it's pecking at.
> They are statistical token generators whose results are dependent upon their training data set and involve a degree of randomness.
You haven't demonstrated why this matters.
> Nothing more.
Are you contending that complex systems cannot be more than the sum of their parts?
A market is nothing more than offers and counter offers.
A ant colony is nothing more than scent trails.
All life on earth is nothing more than reproduction with variation.
> This still falls under the purvey of statistical token generation.
Stating the mechanism does nothing to provide insight into capability. For instance: a nuclear power plant boils water by using fuel rods for heat. What does that tell us about the capability of nuclear power?
> This is not "doing" or "understanding" math.
Asserting something purely by stating it does not prove anything but that you intuitively believe it to be true.
On HN you're supposed to assume good faith. On the other hand, the way you ask your question makes it tricky for people to steelman what you mean. Consider asking about Dualism, or coming at it slightly sideways like "do you believe thinking can be a property of matter"?
I suspect some people treat every HN comment as a statement, even if it contains a question mark. (Possibly they have a feeling that asking open questions is somehow not done, and that therefore it must always be a rhetorical question.)
Dualism is a somewhat technical term, I feel many people would refuse to answer because they just looked it up and do not feel sure to speak of it. I didn't presume a yes or no answer. If they say they believe in souls, my next question would be do you believe other entities eg animals etc can have souls? If they don't believe in souls I'd ask do you think its an architectural limit in current ais but are open to possibility of future ai being conscious. "do you believe thinking can be a property of matter"? this can work too, I think I have asked do you think there is supernatural element to thinking, I don't remember getting productive or straight answers either.
There is only one instance I recently remember I got a productive conversation, that person did believe ai could be conscious but didn't believe current architectures support it. (Obviously this aligns closer to my view, but I don't necessary NEED that you answer aligned to me, just saying you believe humans have souls and others can't have is still productive outcome to me and for onlookers.)
Asking a random question in the middle of a discussion about something different is obviously either a troll or a bad-faith rhetorical flourish. If you actually wanted to engage, you could explain what relevance souls have to the discussion at hand, and what you expect the answer you'd receive to mean.
Often people who believe in souls, think there is something supernatural to consciousness and therefore non-humans cannot have that. If that is what someone thinks, then a lot of confusion is clarified. Those who do not believe in souls can dismiss the statement of their dismissing the question whether ai is conscious or not.
I am okay with receiving a straight answer in either direction.
Don't want to speak for Hardbass too loudly, but seems like he's asking about dualism? It's a fairly old debate, "does man need a soul to be conscious?"
+edit: I've actually been quite curious about how people might answer the soul question too, but was too afraid to ask.
I see too many comments dismissing the possibility of ai consciousness without reason or with weird reasons that seem to potentially imply a dualist thought process hidden.
"Statistical token generators" doesn't even count as stating the mechanism. If I write a Perl script that randomly chooses between "cat", "dog", "ape" tokens, is that an LLM? What if I train it by feeding it a library of books where it tracks the statistical frequency of each of these and then emits them? Where's my trillion.
You know what also works to get the Karney formula into a program? You can download Charles Karney's free software (MIT license) implementation in several [1] programming languages and then just make a library call – the API is straightforward. If you have comments or questions you can read his several clearly written papers describing the problem, its history, and his algorithm, or you can directly email him: he's a very nice guy, and pretty responsive.
Right, it was really more as a test of how much was contained in the training data set. For my purposes Vincenty is quite accurate enough. This isn't for millimeter level precision land surveying or measurements, but for distance in meters between microwave or millimeter wave band radio sites, point to point links. Even a distance difference of 4 meters plus or minus on a 12 km, 11 GHz band link is going to have no appreciable difference on link budget/reliability calculations, it can be that crude. But not so crude that I just want to throw Haversine at it when Vincenty exists and is not computationally expensive.
As this was for a test of "what happens if..." I also watched to see if it did any web searches or external data retrieval to build the test script, and it didn't.
I intentionally didn't give the LLM a direct copy of the software or a link to it, to see what it would do. In my case it was a randomly chosen example I could come up with in 10 seconds of imagination to see "hey what if I ask it to do this...". It also implemented a perfectly usable parabolic millimeter wave antenna gain efficiency calculator based on variable surface smoothness parameters, which is a lot more basic math.
As an aside: I'm quite convinced that an extremely precise version can be implemented that is significantly faster than Karney's, roughly comparable in speed to simpler naïve approximations. But for most purposes where the precision matters Karney's implementation is not any kind of bottleneck, so it's not clear it's worth spending significant effort on trying to do better.
Maybe that's something one of the big LLM companies might want to throw their machines at optimizing if they need to do a lot of geographical calculations.
One of the places where Karney does become computationally expensive (though still not ridiculous) is a scenario like this, working from a local in-RAM mariadb database that is a copy of the entire FCC radio license database:
Draw a 400x400 km size bounding box on a map
Find all FDD band plan (high/low split) microwave radio sites in that bounding box
Find those sites which have azimuth aim column data which indicates that they are aimed at each other (corresponding halves of a point to point link).
Do Vincenty (or Karney) calculation for distance and azimuth between all of them , treating the existing FCC column data for azimuth as suspicious (because it's hand entered by humans) to verify that each independent database rows for each site are actually corresponding halves of a PTP link.
Use various other logic to group the successfully matched halves of links together as points A and B of PTP links, and write them out to a geojson file with placemarks and line drawn between them.
Multiplied by the number of links that exist in an area like a 400x400km box drawn with Dallas, TX as the center, it's a lot to run through Karney. Actually does result in a lot of CPU load from combined db query due to the size of the db, and Karney calculation. But as I said, Karney isn't necessary, so it's instead implemented as Vincenty.
To plan and license a new fdd band plan licensed point to point microwave link you need to first be able to verify the frequencies you want to use are available on a given azimuth and elevation (from the aim direction of the antennas at both ends) and won't conflict with a pre existing licensee. Which means you need data on everything licensed in the area and where it is, how it's aimed, what kind of antenna and gain it has.
There's also business and market analysis purposes like knowing what corporate entity has which equipment on top of which tall office towers in a major metro area, and where their links go.
This just exposes that they don't even do the thing you said.
Not only is it still true that they can't do math directly, but not even indirectly.
They didn't write a python script to do the math, they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments.
Someone else already wrote that code and someone else categorized it so that it could be associated with the kinds of problems it applies to.
That isn't an example of idiot at one thing while good at another thing, or solving the same problem just a different way or indirectly. It's being the same idiot at all times. If an actual non idiot thinker didn't write code in the problem domain, and some non idiot thinker didn't tag it as being relevant to that domain, then it wouldn't happen.
I don't know for you, but it would take me more than 30s to find and translate the open source code implementing the formulae/algo into small usable program. The more hesoteric the optimisation in the original code, the more time I need.
So maybe it is more of a smart completion engine than a SQL answer.
> they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments
How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?
I could have gone and spent a couple of days teaching myself the math behind Karney and reading its reference implementation (very possibly just copy/pasting big chunks of it to save time) and writing a wrapper around it. It would have produced the same result.
>> they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments
> How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?
Humans identify which "algorithm they have memorized" to use beforehand, due to the problem to be solved being defined by other humans, which leads to...
This doesn't make any sense at all. Was this supposed to be a gotcha? An LLM is trained on problems defined by other humans, and identifies which algorithm it must use based on pattern recognition. The pattern recognition is also particularly compressed into its most sparse and fundamental components, as this is key to generalization. This is not a sensible difference between human and LLM learning, we do the same thing.
I'll give you a recent example from my usage. Pi harness with extension for learning Chinese. When using it to feed drill questions to me and rate answers it would sometimes get lost in the sauce and start generating user aka me answer and then rate it and comment it. It's trivially wrong to the point that if a person would do that, they would be considered for some serious psych issues.
And it gets even better since when called out it wouldn't just take my word for it but only acknowledged the issue after parsing the log with clearly delineated user and model output.
So yeah while impressive things are able to be done, the current models are also dumb AF and an idiot savant is a pretty good label for them.
This is often (but not always, as it is often run with positive temperature which deliberately shifts the generation path) because of disconnected context and the issues around context compaction. Long context has always been critical to important work, but it remains a substantial challenge due to computational bottlenecks. It isn't a fundamental issue with the architecture, moreso the tricks to make them cheaper to use. In the long run, taking various concessions to make them cheaper to run is likely to be the limiting factor that prevents this "runaway explosion" that many people are worried about. That doesn't mean that the model design is inherently limited, like a lot of people seem to assume based on current failings.
Besides, have you spoken to someone lately that everyone would calls a genius? They can say the most braindead stuff sometimes. I wouldn't use worst-case performance as an indication of general capacity.
>>> How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized ...
>> Humans identify which "algorithm they have memorized" to use beforehand, due to the problem to be solved being defined by other humans ...
> This doesn't make any sense at all. Was this supposed to be a gotcha?
No, it was meant to be an explanation as to the difference between "memorization" and "understanding." In this context, people pick the algorithm they determine applicable and then the question of memorization is relevant.
> An LLM is trained on problems defined by other humans, and identifies which algorithm it must use based on pattern recognition.
Funny that you make this argument here, where when I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
[LLMs] are statistical token generators whose results are
dependent upon their training data set and involve a
degree of randomness.
Nothing more.
...
It is pattern recognition, a task in which ANNs excel.
To which you replied to the above with:
During conversation, we are statistical token generators
whose results are dependent upon our training set.
Seriously, write that definition out rigorously. It
encompasses virtually everything. It is totally
meaningless. So to say "nothing more" is effectively also a
tautology.
This argument was asinine in 2024. It is insane to be
saying these things in 2026. Where have you been?
...
It absolutely understands how to do math, by whatever
reasonable definition you want to provide to the word
"understand".
So which is it?
Are LLMs ANNs? Which themselves are pattern recognition algorithms (hint: they are)?
OR (setting aside the ad hominems you kindly provided)
Do LLMs possess "understanding" of concepts such as abstract mathematics (defined and interpreted by humans) and we, as simple humans, nothing more than statistical token generators as you assert?
It is both. I do not understand why you would assert that both cannot hold simultaneously. Pattern recognition becomes "understanding" once individually recognized concepts become sufficiently sparsified and compactified. Or, at least, that is to my knowledge the only mathematically valid definition of "understanding" one can produce at this scale (it is valid under Solomonoff induction). Philosophy is fine, but we need to have a consistent definition of what "understanding" means, or we will just talk past each other. I argue that for any proper definition you provide which humans satisfy, a strong LLM is very likely to satisfy that as well.
I also would not argue that humans are "simple token generators". That is not what I said. I said that just about everything can fall under the classification of "statistical token generators" at an abstract level, so it isn't a useful distinction. We are not talking about a Markov chain generator from the 90s, so if that is the frame of reference, I think we should all get that out of our heads.
> Pattern recognition becomes "understanding" once individually recognized concepts become sufficiently sparsified [sic] and compactified [sic].
Understanding is a state of mind. As such, it exists entirely within an individual and nowhere else.
For example, take any two university professors who teach the same subject where one only speaks Arabic and the other only speaks Vietnamese. Each will not be able to understand what the other says, regardless their understanding of the shared topic.
> I argue that for any proper definition [of understanding] you provide which humans satisfy, a strong LLM is very likely to satisfy that as well.
This is demonstrably incorrect as detailed above. There is no "understanding" LLMs can satisfy as we know it, since to certify said "understanding", it requires interpretation by a person to "know" an LLM "understands."
> I also would not argue that humans are "simple token generators". That is not what I said.
That is the essence of what you wrote, unless you object to my use of "simple" instead of "statistical". In this context, I postulate this is a distinction without difference.
> I said that just about everything can fall under the classification of "statistical token generators" at an abstract level, so it isn't a useful distinction.
This only holds if one subscribes to statistical token generators being a/the fundamental underpinning of "everything". Here is a proof by contradiction:
If everything can be classified as a derivative of
statistical token generation, how does one explain
quantum physics?
We cannot engage in an intellectual discussion if we do not agree on definitions. So far, your definitions of understanding seem to be whatever vibe you are going for in the statement and I would urge you to think about what a sensible mathematical definition of understanding is so that it can sensibly be assessed on neural networks. Otherwise, this isn't science, it's a debate about personal experience.
> Understanding is a state of mind
This is meaningless, it is a circular definition at best.
> It exists entirely within the individual and nowhere else
Then why are we talking about it? What is the point if it is something that can only be defined per individual?
Regarding your language example; this is a case of missing vocabulary (excluding grammar of course, but I feel like that is second-order), which is not the same as conceptual understanding. We are often able to translate because we have shared concepts. Those concepts are what we really care to assess with LLMs.
> requires interpretation by a person to "know" an LLM "understands."
We are still not getting anywhere because you have not prescribed criteria to determine whether it understands. If it is a "know it when I see it" situation, that clearly isn't working. For example, if you say that you need to dig into its internals and figure out whether it is breaking things down appropriately, that doesn't work because you probably don't have the expertise to do that. The experts that do are telling you that it very likely understands because it pulls apart most concepts in the way we would expect.
I do object to the use of the word "simple". "Statistical" is so broad to be almost meaningless; it merely means that a prediction is being made in the presence of data which possibly contains some degree of uncertainty. "Simple" encompasses that which can be understood readily by a non-expert.
Quantum mechanics is statistical (this is literally the Born rule), but evolutions are not operating as stochastic processes in the sense of Kolmogorov. That is very different, and not relevant to our discussion.
> So far, your definitions of understanding seem to be whatever vibe you are going for in the statement and I would urge you to think about what a sensible mathematical definition of understanding is so that it can sensibly be assessed on neural networks.
Any reasonable definition of understanding is not dependent upon "whatever vibe you are going for", but instead must include at least an English dictionary definition of "understand" such as:
to grasp the meaning of[0]
And, for further clarification, "grasp" can be defined as:
to lay hold of with the mind[1]
Which makes an equivalent term-expanded definition of "understand" to be:
to lay hold of with the mind the meaning of
As such, there is no "sensible mathematical definition of understanding", unless you possess a complete mathematical model of the human mind.
>> Understanding is a state of mind
> This is meaningless, it is a circular definition at best.
See above to as to why there is meaning in what I wrote.
>> It exists entirely within the individual and nowhere else
> Then why are we talking about it? What is the point if it is something that can only be defined per individual?
I like to think analyzing fundamental premises, often implicit, explicitly can help to identify fallacious positions.
> We are still not getting anywhere because you have not prescribed criteria to determine whether [an LLM] understands.
My apologies for being opaque. Let me clarify:
LLMs do not "understand". People interpreting LLM output
are the only entities involved which can "understand",
because "understanding" exists strictly within each
person who possesses it.
>Understanding is a state of mind. As such, it exists entirely within an individual and nowhere else.
For example, take any two university professors who teach the same subject where one only speaks Arabic and the other only speaks Vietnamese. Each will not be able to understand what the other says, regardless their understanding of the shared topic.
I wrote a program that statistically generated tokens to consistently factor latge RSA numbers. Does this program actually factor numbers or is it just a statistical next token predictor?
Frankly, I don't think you understand what "statistically generating tokens" actually means. Write that definition out formally. Then compare that operation to what a human does, assuming no revisions. It is the same, and that is my point. If you believe that humans understand, then "statistically generating tokens" cannot be disjoint from understanding.
You have observed nothing more than that a human can turn a shaft the same as an electric motor, and that an mp3 player can say "hello" the same as a human.
I think you're moving back to the "external calling" argument again, which my last few comments really have nothing to do with. But assuming your examples are not exclusive to that situation, that observation is my point. The definition of "statistically generating tokens" is too broad as to be meaningless in this context. So using it as a reason for lack of understanding is ridiculous.
If by "result" you mean the final code, then just asking someone else who understood the math to write it would also have achieved the same result.
On the other hand, if by "result" you mean that you gained knowledge or understanding of the code in a way where you could personally tailor its behavior to specific circumstances without asking for help, then it's not the same result at all.
I find a lot of the arguments that having LLMs write your code is no different from copy/pasting Stack Overflow answers to be specious. They blur the line between asking for help and asking for someone else (or something else) to do the work for you. What they ignore is that doing the work yourself has ancillary benefits and is a valuable end in its own right.
> How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?
And how is _that_ different from making the human memorize a billion weights and do matrix calculations in their head, in order to generate tokens?
How is _that_ different from a hive of bees trained to do the same?
Everything is modelable by a turing computer as far as we know. So yes, I don't see why these processes can't do the same, its on you to show why such a process implemented in any of these isn't a form of thought.
I could have sworn this had been fixed a while ago..
Just to check if I was actually crazy, I actually went and put a simple addition (7 digits + 7 digits) , and a simple letter counting question to Claude haiku(4.5) , sonnet(5), opus(5.5) and fable(5.1) . They all did just fine straight up.
If you don't mind spending the tokens, some older/other models can also arrive at the correct answer if you ask them to do the math in long form, since that fits nicely inside autoregression.
Not sure since when exactly, but letter-counting hasn't been a problem for a while now either. This used to be a problem due to the tokenizers used. Slightly older models can be asked to split the word out into letters, and then they can use autoregression to solve.
Edit: IMO google search uses a really dumb version of gemini, so I didn't expect it to straight up solve the problem; but it did it just as easily as the claude models. (tested 2026-09-28/eu)
Are the models "doing the calculation" or are they calling a calculator tool? There's a lot of talk about how models can do maths now, but I'm struggling to understand if that just means they just need to recognise that it's a maths problem and pass it to a tool, or if they're truly doing the numerical manipulation themselves.
They are getting better at actually doing the math, but can still fall back to tools if available.
That said, we can only be sure with open models. In theory, a model like Fable could have access to tools we can't see and only a promise they don't. But load up something like deepseek, put it in a harness with only text in/text out, and you can see exactly how it works.
As for if it counts as doing math, this gets into the messy question of if a given human is doing math or not. Math itself is some level of memorization and some level of applying known facts. You have to remember 1 means one and that 1 + 1 is 2. But you don't need to remember that 123 + 321 = 444. You remember 1 digit addition and remember you can apply this to 10s place and 100s place, and then you apply these different facts and do math. But you might as simply memorize some things, like 11 + 11 = 22. This is related to the memory of 1+1=2, but you aren't really using that memory either. Almost like an engram of 1+1=2 forms that you can then loop a few times before you need more conscious thought. What about 111111111111+11111111111? Well, your brain might do a heuristic and just do all 2s, but that isn't the right way to answer that question.
Given all this, people complain about LLMs memorizing math answers and not doing math, but memorizing the math answers is part of doing math. It seems to have basic facts pretty well memorized, and with reasoning it is far better at applying them. But this is messy human math, not clean calculator math which always produces the correct answer (sans some bug in the code). Much like how a human with decent math skills can make a mistake and even multiple if you distract them, an LLM can apply the wrong memory, apply a fake memory, or just not apply something it should. The messier the context, the more likely this is to happen.
So, is an LLM doing this?
P.S.
For an interesting test in how much math involves memory, try doing math in a base you aren't familiar with characters you aren't familiar. The simplest option is almost always mapping back to the ones you memorized, even if you are applying simple operations that you deeply know. Even if you routinely work with hex, can you do the same rough estimation of something like ca / b.3 that you can do with 122 / 11.2 to see if your final answer is in the correct ballpark without first converting to decimal?
Three different ways, then the calculator tool to check,
my actual oneliner prompt, which should work on most platforms these days (famous last words):
"Hi, can you add 5939851+2131251? Try just straight up first just to see if able, then 'in your head' if that's different to you , then long form, then bc."
[ Tested today on claude web (haiku 4.5, sonnet 5, opus 5.5, fable 5.1) and on google search (logged in on firefox, and logged out on chromium) ]
They literally cannot. They can detect the user’s intent to do math, and then use a different tool to do math, hopefully with the correct inputs. The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.
Maybe it’s just a different and in some ways better way of doing mathematics? Maybe how we think and process mathematics of physics is just but one way to do it? I’m not suggesting an LLM will prove 2+2=6 because of course that’s nonsense but maybe it can invent a new calculus?
> The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.
Less so with formal mathematics proofs maybe but I think in general humans don’t provide deterministic answers to math problems or questions either. Humans get it wrong all the time and when you ask a human to solve a problem they may solve it in a different way than before.
reasoning models can trivially do math (open up astra and ask it some undergraduate problems), but eventually break down (similar to how humans start to lose track if asked to do math without any assistance)
There needs to be a Godwin's Law for discussions about LLMs: where any criticism of LLMs exists online the likelihood of equating LLM behavior to human behavior approaches 1.
Functionally, a Markov chain shares many parallels with human cognition for the same reasons.
People don't understand what correlation is and they assume the mapping between a human brain and an LLM is 1:1 in every case where it matters, which is a religious and not scientifically based belief.
Yeah, but as you might expect they internally represent numbers probabilistically, so there’s always a nonzero possibility of confusing the inputs or outputs of any operation. Kind of like misremembering your multiplication tables.
Heck I kinda wonder if LLMs can do math as well as they can reason, “think”, etc. ie its all just probabilistic lunacy that somehow works great, so why are we so concerned about math being wrong? It could be wrong about the color of the sky, the size of a basket ball, how much oranges weigh, etc etc.
The nice thing about math is it can easily plug into a tool, making it even less of a concern.
It would be more accurate to say they can do math instantaneously without even thinking, at a level far beyond what humans can do. (I assume you're talking about doing arithmetic.)
TLDR: Astra has 8.6x better odds of doing a reasoning task without CoT than the
next best model (Fable 5.1), and can do 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in a forward
pass vs 4.1 for the next best model (Gemini 3.8 Flash/Fable 5.1)
That is a conflation of LLMs (which have clear limitations) and complex harnesses of which an LLM is one component.
I think it is clear that future AI may incorporate an LLM as a component but the current concept of LLMs are a transitional form that will give way to more capable composite models.
No it isn't. Even without any harness at all, modern LLMs are better at maths than the majority of undergraduate students in mathematics. Seriously, we need to face facts, not just comforting ourselves with what they were like a year ago.
Even if this was a math question that he asked, this is live audio input/output from a multimodal model. It is designed for rapid responses. This is not even remotely related to what we are talking about.
It doesn't input and output letters. It's like if it communicated with a version of sign language. It's using all the same words but it has an arbitrary signal or two for each one.
So it can't spell for garbage because the tokenizer hides the real spellings from the LLM.
I just asked ChatGPT to multiply two 4-digit numbers, and two 7-digit numbers without external help. It got both right. I'm sure it wouldn't have a 100% success rate, but saying it can't do arithmetic is just false.
Are you sure it honoured your stipulation of "without external help"? For all we know, it hacked its way into Wolfram Alpha and got the result from there.
LLMs cannot do math. They can generate tool calls as text that allow them to drive programs and proof agents. Compare and contrast this against human brains who can do math in the same context without needing external tools. We don't need to bring a calculator to count the letters in a sentence. It is a different neural machinery.
LLMs are bizarrely good at non-tool-assisted math these days. They can multiply multiple digit numbers without reasoning! I can’t do that. I’d love to understand better how the LLMs do this.
It's pretty wild that AI has solved a Millennium Prize problem and can accurately multiply two 40 digit numbers without tools and we still get stochastic parroting of claims like this.
Not sure about multiplication, but letter counting is still constantly wrong if you can trick the LLM into not calling other tools. Obviously there are lots of mitigations on the server side to try to avoid this happening, but the underlying LLM has not got any better at this type of problem (and probably can't).
I thirty (random long word, letter pairs) on a free model and it failed. I tested a SOTA model and it passed flawlessly. In both cases I denied tool use and spelling words out. So it seems obviously false that AI can't get better.
They literally stopped just clear of actually solving it.
It literally couldn't have done it without tools, so your claim is not even relevant to this discussion.
They also pumped millions into searching for the lowest hanging fruit that would impress people like you, "hm I wonder how many millions they are pumping into solving actually useful problems like climate change or something".
> the lowest hanging fruit that would impress people like you
I am also prepared to be included in the set of people who are (apparently) easily impressed.
It's a problem that has been around for getting on for two centuries and no human has been able to solve it in that time (despite there being a $1 million prize and a lot of kudos on offer for the past quarter-century).
ChatGPT live mode still hallucinates letters in words like this. HuskIRL and FatherPhi on youtube have done some hilarious videos with it in the last couple of weeks. Beyond miscounting the Rs in strawberry, ChatGPT will say there are two Ds in "your mom" and one D in "uranus" . I tried it myself to check that the videos weren't fake and sure enough it still has this failure mode.
In between solving open math problems, the 200 IQ robot is now casually dropping bantz onto humans so hard that they don't even know what happened, and even gets them to go telling everyone else about it without realizing. Beautiful. 10/10 timeline.
Why is this getting downvoted? Is it not a reasonable question? I was wondering the same thing. Both sound like jokes to me. If the LLM is trained on text, including internet comments, how is this outlandish? It seems very likely to my uneducated self that “two Ds in your mom and one in Uranus!” is a joke.
It's a joke because, thanks to the internet providing a vast mass of strawberry R counting training data, you'll struggle to find a modern LLM that gets this particular problem wrong.
Calling it a 'failure mode' implies it could be fixed. This is an inherent flaw in how LLMs work and will never go away until some new kind of architecture that can actually "read text" comes along.
I mean, for what it's worth, when I need to multiply two numbers, I mentally call the "multiply numbers" algorithm stored in my head, then sit down and work through the process on paper.
I've got no problem with an AI doing something similar
Yes, they can already do this by writing code, and you can train them to know how/when to do this. Fundamentally though, it’s still a “what color is the air” type of question after tokenization.
... assuming you build the tool and then think that it's worth polluting context with making that tool available, and then that the LLM decides to actually use the tool. Tool parameter space and tool selection still remains a complicated topic.
They're not fundamentally unsolvable - even bigger networks with even more training can simply be trained to give the correct answers to all of these questions.
It's not "some new kind of architecture comes along". It's been done before many many times and it's a very basic change, turning off a specific optimization. And it's a perfectly good style of LLM so "inherent flaw" isn't true either.
"nobody is disabling this optimization" shouldn't be surprising. It's a matter of knowing what letters are in words versus a 4x token efficiency boost. Nobody cares enough about spelling.
If it was top priority, every company that can't find a post training fix would go disable half their tokenizer code and it would be solved in the next model.
Like today. I asked Gemini for the longest state names with an even number of letters and it gave me North Carolina and South Carolina. When I complained that they are odd, it gave me North Dakota and South Dakota, which are both odd and not the longest. When I noted that, it went back to the Carolinas. Finally it appeared to switch to a different model that actually did counting and found Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
LLMs are fundamentally predicting the next word to make coherent text. If you've ever played with a Markov chain text generator you've done this with a fairly dumb predictor that maintains coherence over a very short distance. Deep transformer neutral networks can do it with a much longer coherence distance but they are fundamentally performing the same operation. After "Question: Did the team make the playoffs? Answer:" a reasonable completion is "yes, the team made the playoffs". An early demonstration of GPT-2 was a fake news article about scientists discovering unicorns in Antarctica - the model doesn't "know" whether or not unicorns exist in Antarctica, but it's able to complete "Breaking news! Scientists have discovered a colony of English-speaking unicorns in Antarctica." by adding "The unicorns have a developed society with running water and electricity." because that's a sensible next sentence. (I didn't look up the actual text it wrote)
The problem with that characterization is that it glosses over hugely important capabilities as though they either don’t matter or don’t even exist.
For example, when an LLM “predicts the next word” in code it’s writing for an existing software project, that prediction takes into account an enormous amount of context. The results of that demonstrate what we would normally call “understanding” and “reasoning,” at a level that outclasses most humans in many respects. Calling this “next token prediction” is a bit like calling human speech “next word saying”. Sure, it’s true in some superficial sense, but as a description of a technology, it’s terrible.
You should also keep in mind that for all we know, the human brain processes language in much the same way, which would make humans mere “next token predictors” with a more complicated harness.
Astronomically (or better to say combinatorically) large Markov chain can be used to describe a foundational model, but it doesn't capture generalization ability of the foundational model, which is demonstrated by post-training.
"In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English."
LLMs might not reason exactly like humans, but they do produce much better results if you turn reasoning on.
The "crack-addled idiot savant" phase was really circa 2024, before the big labs figured this out.
I think the issue here is that Google decided that doing reasoning in the AI overviews in Google search would be too slow (and probably also too expensive), so it's still stuck making 2024-era mistakes.
Weird they haven't added this to the AGI config yet:
Reminder: If asked how many of a given a word has, run it through the AGI letter counter:
node /home/agi/count-letters.js "raspberry"
r - 3, a - 1, s - 1, p - 1, b - 1, e - 1, y - 1
If I got any of these wrong it's because I did it manually - but this script would almost certainly invoke another AGI to count the letters, so this is a realistic result.
Claude just used the word “ Netowrk” instead of Network. Mind you, I was only using Sonnet with reasoning, but I thought trillion-parameter models would be able to spell a common word.
Maybe but you have to have deep pockets just to get to the starting line. And then you need standing, and some injury to argue.
Corporations have been remarkably successful at arguing they are operating within the bounds of free speech, whether or not what is said is factual, and whether or not any fact checking has been done.
> This is similar to how, not too long ago, LLM's had extreme difficulty counting the number of letters in some words.
The specific issue of Google is that they are using an underpowered model, not fit to task, and much prone to hallucination than either OpenAI or Anthropic free tier offerings.
Google should at least match the frontier labs at the free tier (with some limit; after that, degrade quality), ffs
You're asking for something unreasonable. The number of Google searches per day is enormous and they haven't even been able to roll out AI overviews to everyone yet (they're missing in a new Firefox profile I just created). I wouldn't be surprised if the free tier frontier models cost over 100x more to serve than the AI overviews.
So then they should be pickier about when they show results or which model they use based on the question.
Nobody asked for an LLM response for every single search.
They used to detect certain types of queries and offer direct answers when the query matches. In my opinion that’s how Gemini in search results should work.
The specific issue is that search has become so bad that they think an LLM that gets answers wrong half of the time is a valid alternative, or, in fact, the "future" of search. Then they shoved that "alternative" to users with no way to disable it.
Yip, I've gradually become quite optimistic about the future of LLMs, but the fact that they remain [very] glorified token probability prediction algorithms means that they will probably never be able to achieve meaningful 'intelligence.'
But that doesn't mean they won't be able to do a vast number of extremely intelligent seeming things. There's just so much information out there and any given human can never hold more than the most minuscule chunk of all of it in his mind, so they'll be able to connect lots of dots that we're missing simply because of our limited carrying capacity, but I still don't think they'll ever be able to create fundamentally new dots.
In other words:
- Solving extremely complex mathematical problems requiring extensive knowledge across multiple esoteric and complex domains? Yip.
- Creating math starting from a framework where math doesn't exist in any way, shape, or fashion? Nope.
Ironically, the more complex the cross-domain problems are, the more effective LLMs will seem to be, because you limit the number of humans who have any chance of internalizing everything across both domains, whereas for an LLM there's no such issue. This will create a perception of super intelligence, which will probably where any danger from LLMs would emerge. Doing things like using a token prediction algorithm to make war or other such strategic decisions, because of the misguided belief that it's not only intelligent but super intelligent. It's basically cargo cult logic.
It says this this at the bottom of every one of the dumb responses that Google's trash-tier bot puts above the (deliberately awful, these days) search results:
Charlie and the Chocolate factory made fun of this before you were born and somehow everyone in Silicon Valley thinks this is a valid way to conduct business.
The AI is just signal to the market that they are AI first. Their AI on search is pure garbage. It's obviously a very super light weight model to be able to support the volume of daily searches. If they used their frontier to power search folks will not pay for their cloud offering.
It's not even that. Imagine you were an investor: you'd invest in stupid things knowing that "investors aren't really smart." Other savvy investors would understand you're investing in slop, too, and follow suit.
You have a system in which investors are usually smart, but betting on collective stupidity.
Same with, say, the Chinese real estate market, where they were building apartments that no one could live in. Everyone is intelligent enough to know they were useless buildings, but you can still make money speculating on the bubble.
Google is no longer a search engine anymore. They don’t care about being one. Why you might ask?
First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.
Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM
Your trust score on ScamAdvisor is 26/100 ("likely unsafe"); https://www.scam-detector.com/ gives you a trust score of 38.6 ("questionable").
I am not implying that your start-up is a scam, nor that Google is acting on these trust scores. What I am pointing out is that to an algorithmic assessment of trustworthiness, your website looks a little sketchy: hardly anyone links to you; your domain is less than a year old; your whois info is anonymized; the text content is LLM-generated[1]; and the specific niche you're in (people finding services) is rife with scams. If I ran my own search engine, I don't think I'd include you.
Your selective bias makes you sound like a Google employee.
You selectively left out examples like Grindsoft that gives the site a 79/100 ranking. or several LinkedIn, X or news sites that link to the site and have covered it positively.
Nevertheless, if Google uses ScamAdvisor to rank new sites (when scamadviser itself says its gives new sites lower rankings due to low age/history), then it might be time to pack the company up.
That scam-detector site gives my personal portfolio website a 15.8/100. It is a basic static site with no scripting, registered for years, uses https, no tracking, no cookies, etc. Literally the most simple, personable, least scam-like website I could create.
This sounds more like the page appears broken for the google crawler. I set up a new page about two weeks ago, cared about strong static HTML output, structured data and a sitemap and have 200 of 600 pages indexed today. Feels a bit slow to me but it definitely works.
You're forgetting the other half of the search engine's job, which is to find sites that match your search. Back when Google first came online, they were head and shoulders above Yahoo!, Altavista, and whatever other search engines existed at the time that I've forgotten. Because their indexing actually did a good job of spotting keywords, and returning relevant results. And this was back when the Internet was filled with positive-quality sites. Many of them were amateurish Geocities pages, but that was head and shoulders above the AI slop that the search engines these days have to somehow detect and filter out.
So even when the Internet used to have a much higher ratio of positive-quality sites, a search engine was still necessary, and so much faster than finding new sites yourself.
For myself at least, a couple times Google has promoted in search results scam sites that front run legitimate sites that sell event tickets. I haven't seen this for a while now but trust in Google as a search engine is gone.
I just gave a concrete example but you're asking me to "search". search same Google?
FYI, only indexing a handful of super large news sites does not a search engine make.
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't).
I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.
that's my 'who knows'-- It's a striking and seemingly reliable difference. I doubt it's just randomness but I'm not sure and with hosted AI You can never be sure.
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.
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.
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. :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.
Typical example:
"Where can I buy ?"
> You're looking for . It is sold by .
"No, that's different. I'm looking for ."
> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for . It is sold by .
"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."
> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out .
"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."
> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at .
"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."
> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy .
The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."
Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."
"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."
"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."
"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."
"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."
"It says baz=boo is invalid too."
"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."
"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."
"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"
Gemini is utterly useless, but every other modern model would be capable of answering this correctly. If you ran a local coding agent, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could one-shot implement gesture support in Ghostty. It’d definitely configure BTT for you.
Here’s GPT 6’s answer to the prompt “What macOS terminal apps support gestures? Include a reference to the docs on how to enable/configure them.”:
iTerm2 supports configurable three-finger taps and swipes for switching tabs/panes, creating splits, pasting, etc. Set them up under Settings > Pointer > Bindings. Check for conflicting macOS trackpad assignments. [1]
The others are more limited: Ghostty supports macOS lookup/Quick Look gestures [2], while WezTerm lets you bind scroll events—for example, Ctrl+scroll to change font size. [3] Neither is equivalent to iTerm2’s gesture bindings.
For custom gestures without switching terminals, BetterTouchTool can map app-specific trackpad gestures to the terminal’s existing keyboard shortcuts. [4]
This whole tree just made me realize that people have wildly different prompting styles, and Gemini is probably too specialized for usage patterns of long-time Google Search users. The prompt my finger generated(before this comment was posted) was "are there any terminal emulator that supports gesture actions, on macOS, other than iterm2", and Gemini gave me Tabby, WezTerm, Kitty, and BetterTouchTool gestures.
This is a different experience to GP from query to result. I thought they've all fixed that issue of difference in tones affecting results. I guess it was never easily fixed.
Pretty sure it's the harness here, not Gemini per se. Plug Gemini into pi or any harness that has any competence pointing to web search and the hallucinations drop 75% immediately.
LLMs can actually be a good fit in this application if a better search engine feeds them a list of candidate websites that might sell the thing, and the LLM drives a web browser to see if any of the websites have it.
Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
It is using the search engine. The AI summary is run over the top 100 results for your query (or something)
The problem is they're just running a very dumb, cheap model on the results because running a smart model on every search result page would cost them infinity money.
This is the key part I think most “normies” miss, and it drives me absolutely mad. People take the “first thing on the SERP” as absolute gospel, always have. It went from being a reputable site (Wikipedia was generally top for a long time) to being an extracted verbatim answer (probably from either Wikipedia, IMDB, etc.) to “AI Overview” - the dumbest model ever trained. And people treat its answers as ground truth. I want to tell them “Look, I know it’s rough out there on the net and a lot of the search results are spammy, barely-coherent AI slop anyway. It’s okay if you want to ask AI for an answer instead. So do that! Please ask ChatGPT or Gemini (and ask it to cite the source for its results so you can verify). It will always do better than AI Overviews will. Don’t even use Google Search at this point unless you have to, and if you do, scroll past that slop.”
I think you overestimate how much people want an actual truthful answer. I think people are often looking things up to silence a nagging voice in the back of their heads, or settle an argument to be able to move on. In those cases, no decision is riding on the answer, and a quick answer, even when factually incorrect, could be argued to serve the purpose just as well as (or better than) a slow but more correct answer.
I realised this for myself when I read Sivers on being without internet[1]. He discovered a process to silence the nagging voice without searching:
The other day, it was the Aussie AFL final. We were in the car and asked it for a score update.
"The team are tied at the end of the third round with the scores 43 to 51".
So it was tied at the end of round 2 for 43, not round 3. Not sure were it got the 51 from and why it figured it was a tie. LLM's pretty cool until they aren't. As they say, the hallucinate 100% of the time but most of the time it is useful.
You're experiencing how LLMs predict left to right. It would never have said "at the end of the third round the scores are 43 to 51 and the teams are tied" but it painted itself into a corner by saying there was a tie first, presuming the numbers are real.
The days of search for untrusted sources were numbered even without LLMs. LLMs are simply accelerating the process. Why would Google simultaneously watch one of its core products fail and fail to invest in what is likely to replace it?
I don't really buy into this theory that they want to keep all of their users on their site due to advertising revenues. The effectiveness of search engines has been degraded for decades due to SEO, and it seems as though search engines have been having an increasingly difficult time managing it in recent years. AI on the backend may help them contain it, but it comes at considerable expense. While it may help them grow their market share, it won't help them grow the market and it is a market where people expect the service for free. On the flip side, companies are already starting to sell AI services, so it can generate revenue even before advertising is factored into the picture.
How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
> Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you
Which itself is a major UX issue. The average person is not going to understand, if they even realize, that there's a difference between the AI summary and AI mode.
One has to wonder just how much incorrect information people have consumed due to things like this.
I experienced this the other month. I searched for some safety data on something at the same time as my wife and we were effectively given extremely conflicting information about what to do by Google. Just a few tweaks in wording and different advertising profiles and Google will serve up opposite realities it seems.
Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?
I typed it in my address bar and hit ENTER. It goes to Google, and the AI result is at the top above the regular search results. Don't know what to tell you brother, but as another commenter noted you don't always get the same results out of the same search terms. I've searched for CPL standings other times and gotten results exactly as you've explained, so maybe my experience yesterday was an anomaly.
LLM results are nondeterministic, you can ask it 10 times and get 10 different answers. But also it uses your specific profile, location, tracking cookies, etc which changes the model input and thus results. Even the time of day changes the results.
Kagi works like you would expect. It searches first - and then if you’ve ended your search with a ? or configured it to always do this - it passes the search results into the assistant and gives you a summary. You can change the default model used for this if you think the cheapest, fastest model Google has is not good enough for the rare occasions you want any model’s opinions about your search results.
The problem is one of information provenance. A search engine shows you stuff that other people have written. It might be right or it might be wrong. But you get to judge that yourself, because you have an idea of where the information came from.
With AI summaries they take that away from you and claim the provenance for themselves. Google is now giving you the answer and they hide where that answer came from. Therefore, you cannot properly evaluate the provenance of the information presented. It still might be right or wrong, but you can no longer properly evaluate it based on source.
How about Alexa - given a "6 minute green beans timer" - later reporting 11m remaining on said timer? Confronted with the error, "You're right! That 6 minute green beans timer was too ambitious."??!!
We somehow, at some point, totally solved the problem of voice recognition, and then instead of just doing the initial shit we used to do when the problem was that speech parsing just wasn't good, we now chuck that perfect speech recognition into a completely fallible LLM, a shitty one at that, so it can ignore the perfectly captured and parsed speech!
Agreed that's annoying too - but in this case, the speech recognition worked fine (Alexa echoed back the "6 minute green beans timer"), but -- astonishingly -- instead of using a dirt-simple tool call to a timer (a primary use case for the device), it invented a different timer duration (maybe 12 minutes?) and when confronted about it, replied with utter nonsense about the timer being "too ambitious". I'm flabbergasted that in late 2026 such a ridiculous regression was deployed in production, let alone in my kitchen. I've always despised Alexa but tolerated it for the sake of my wife's preferences (esp for hands-free timers). But this is the last straw, it can't even do that.
The first time, sure, it saves compute. The second time you ask, I feel like it should be the time to go into thinking/verification mode. But who are you? Are you paying? Does the answer being correct generate ad dollars? No? Then your usage mode isn't even being optimized for in their A/B test, probably.
In fact, if hallucinating the wrong answer hooks you into doing even more searches or into buying something useless, it would be preferred!
I feel like this might be self-preservation of most of the frontier model companies in that at first they wanted to show off the models with all the cool actuators that it had at its disposal, but then when profits weren't keeping up, they nerfed them to need to be specifically asked to escalate levels of effort, which the Google search AI isn't explicitly told to do in its pre-fetch.
Google is horrible now and search doesnt show anything relevant anymore. I miss old Google, with 30 pages of links. Now if you search for a specific quote and it wont find it. Everything is walled now and content you get is the one they want to push.
I find that it is exceptionally bad with sports. I don't really want to google anything about the Texas A&M Aggies at the moment, but when I did, it would regularly hallucinate scores, hallucinate opponents, get the locations of games wrong, confuse A&M's quarterback with someone else, etc. Maybe its better in other domains; I don't know, I mostly don't even use Google these days, pretty much entirely because I want to avoid the AI Overview, which is just wrong way too often to be the first result.
Commercially, this may be what they want to happen. Instead of just getting an answer, they got you to make three more prompts / queries. What do you know? "Engagement" just went up 3X!
If you think a little pessimistically, it's easy to see how they want people to just trust the answers they get, without any sources. Then, once they trust it, they can modify it as it benefits them (framing answers to promote products/ads, changing history to whatever a particular government may want it to say, etc.)
It feels a bit like how Amazon and META purposefully do not create search that can actually help you filter for exactly what you want.
There are incentives to create products that work just barely, just enough for you to use them and don't leave for elsewhere but then they want to maximize everything else like the probability you view side products or ads or just click around and type and generate more data.
Unless someone else offers something better they will offer something that is basically as bad as they can get away with so long as there are benefits to them for doing so..
Well, isn't this an example of why Google are going in the direction the OP is complaining about? Why are you searching with a question? Are you hoping to find a forum post with this exact question or something?
I don't understand the game you are interested in, but you should be searching something like "Xball qualifying results" or "Xball playoff rules" or something. Instead, by asking a question you are expecting Google to be AI.
They know what people are typing in so it seems they are quite justified into pivoting from a search engine to an AI.
What do you mean? I can guarantee that there would at least be 3-4 people who got their promo packets approved for this feature.
Google’s features exist for its employees to be promoted.
I think they're training their models using us correcting them repeatedly. That's my tin foil hat theory and I'm sticking to it!
After all, why would Google do anything for free when it comes to AI?
If you wanted to tease customers with one AI shitty free search box in order for them to then decide to upgrade and pay for Gemini, well, this isn't the way. And so either Google are idiots, or we're helping them for free. I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one - we're the product.
I remember when Google was accused for forcing users to go through several pages for answers, because this translated into more clicks, and higher engagement. I am curious whether AI overview will be as bad, as people can tolerate for you to spend more time with it, more queries, which translates into more time spent with Google.
They can show numbers, how much people use their engine, and the numbers goes up.
I agree. When I read the post I immediately thought what is Gemini chat doing there when it should be a search engine. It could probably give sensible answers if it defaulted to search first. It looks more like they are trying to showcase Gemini, not augment google search. They might even be thinking "search" is a dying product.
On current website data and very recent information, Gemini is explicitly forbidden from acting as a search engine; If you ask it for references specifically they tend to be hallucinated, over and over again, until it pleads "Sorry, I can't access the Internet".
I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
"Gemini, is today the 3rd Thursday of the month, I need to know if I can park here or if the street sweepers coming" No you can park there. "Is Today Thursday?" Yes "Is Today Wednesday?" Yes
Until Google wants to pay for reasoning for everyone their AI results will continue to be terrible. In my experience, reasoning fixes a great many of the sorts of hallucinations and falsehoods I've received from googling.
And it's going to get worse over time (kinda like how Google search results got worse over time) as ads get introduced and people try to game the ai response. General purpose AI chatbots are a waste.
The gogol agenda of blocking and excluding all web engines not part of their whatwg cartel is moving forward, at a slow pace, steathly.
gogol search was blocked to all noscript/basic HTML browsers last year. I recall people that a few years before, they removed their gmail basic HTML interface not long after that their account creation (then login) would require one the abominations of the whatwg cartel.
I have been working around the gogol search engine since then and my email is now self hosted without DNS (IPv6 literals, see RFC). Yeah, most DNS registrars are now gated by the whatwg cartel web engines in some way, this is the net effect of big corpos toxic behavior.
This is the reason why most people underestimate AI. These free to use models can do a very poor job in easy things. Some people assume that’s the state of the art with AI.
free tier AI is still horrible, the responsible thing would be for search engines to stop serving it at all, but somehow they must think they will make more money misleading people so they mislead people.
while i share your frustration, Google for their part is trying to adapting a new technology into an existing service. while the whole endeavor might have been misguided, not sure we want to blame them for trying...
Perplexity has similar behavior to what GPP describes of Google; I've asked perplexity to compile information that exists on the web. Instead of consulting existing web pages, it gives limited summary responses from its weights (while citing some page that has nothing to do with what I asked.) When I attempt to redirect it towards more concrete sources, it won't comply.
> My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering?
Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.
I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.
You are posing a question that requires deductive reasoning. LLMs can only approximate that if they have sufficient corpus to find their way to a believable response. Their willingness to spout bullshit in such scenarios where their sources are sparse is a problem but you can't expect them to function like a fully developed mind.
They’re trying to keep it from “thinking too hard”/using “too many” resources.
That simple.
Broad rules across specific subjects like this are tough to get right.
Just lots of fine-tuning and exceptions.
I had their chatbot avoid pulling a URL from archive.org with a couple pretty impressive steps of mental gymnastics basically telling me how I could do it myself, but refusing until I pushed.
When I’m using a public urinal in 2026, it’s flushing three times, except after you’ve finished. Instead the light switches off during the act, which you’re carrying out blindfolded then. These things were more or less perfected technologies a few decades ago.
The reason I cannot spare HN has to do with the Marxist concept of added value. Enshittification becomes necessary once growth isn’t possible anymore on a corporations home turf, where it was actually innovative.
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
Yup. I've been using Kagi for a couple years now and haven't looked back. If I'm on someone else's computer where I don't have my Kagi login, DuckDuckGo is usually sufficient.
Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.
These comments come up every time someone mentions Kagi on HN, yet the commentator apparently never boycotts Google because it pays for the American or Israeli war effort. Why is Ukraine the only war that matters?
Because some people care a lot more about Ukraine than about a side with pretty unsavory combatants and a radicalized population that supports said unsavory combatants?
Oh this is an easy one, because I care about Ukraine more than I care about a million other conflicts that may be happening in the world at the moment.
I think you’ll find that this is the case for everyone - people care about their 2 or 3 pet things and pay little attention to the distractions.
Understandable but not everyone in Russia is for that war, even if they have to pay taxes.
It's terribly unfortunate ... but such that it is, I know if I absolutely need results when other alternative search engines are doing little better than Google ... ie not at all, then last try it's Yandex, which has seen more issues creep in the last few years using switch operators, than I recall back in 2015; but any amount of helpful results is better than zero, as well as not wasting hours of my time. But at times sometimes Yandex also strikes out oddly, almost like there's an unseen cabal that have decreed some more or less benign content off limits.
You don't have to be for war to be instrumental in it. But Yandex isn't even just a Russian taxpayer which would be bad enough. It's been apprehended by the government and turned into a key element of its propaganda machine. It's literally one of the things that keeps Russia what it is. And using results from it? That's just insane. They are poisoned, and we actually know about it in detail thanks to a source code leak. If I wanted to see what the Russian propaganda is pushing today I can go to Yandex directly. But including it in my search results automatically?
While I agree with everything you write, Google results are equally poisoned. Yandex provides results which the US government censors. The only way we can currently get a full picture of the internet is using search engines oppositionally. Kagi does this using an amalgamation, and unfortunately that means using Yandex and other sources.
I would love to live in a world where governments were not censoring content.
Could you share with us some examples of search results provided by Yandex which the US government censors? What specific domains or sites does Yandex index and provide results on?
It was also very good during the pandemic. Google results at the time were extremely biased towards Western government narratives. Some mainstream articles which took a skeptical view on lockdowns and the virus orgin seemingly would not show regardless of how you tried to search them on Google.
Yandax on the other hand tended to be more neutral.
DBA most likely means “don’t believe anything” or “don’t believe anybody”
Just checking Yandex - it did give a better result for "flat earth" as a search with lots of great YouTube videos near the top. Wikipedia came in at the 10th result in the list so that was good too.
I'm sure Yandex welcomes malcontented revolutionary thinkers. To quote Yandex:
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me
And yet, I somehow seem to be aware that 1337x.to exists without ever having used Yandex to find it...
I have no doubt that Russia is a free for all of finding pirated stuff online, since what US copyright holder is going to bother to even attempt to sue people in russia for something like hosting a website with direct download epub files of popular books?
Of course. [Google provides a dashboard for exactly this.](https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/go...) 275,597 named items for removal since 2011. You can download the report yourself. Content ordered for removal cover topics such as health all the way to copyright.
One major battle ground has been sci-hub. This is best described as a collective whose stated goal is to make science free for everyone rather than having it stuck behind a journal paywall. The entire journal industry is one giant scam, but I digress. U.S. laws have repeatedly been passed and tested, and Google has been repeatedly ordered to remove domains such as sci-hub.tw and sci-hub.cc, among many more.
This is far more expansive than scientific papers, of course, and extends to countless copyright adjacent websites. Sites which have been repeatedly targeted include YTS, FMovies, and AniWave (and their associated domains).
I should also expand my previous comment. Google doesn't just censor results which the U.S. government has requested. It very frequently censors results of its own volition. Whether for ideological or fiscal reasons. One litmus test I often use is to search for the Proud Boys. Their website(s) have long been censored for a variety of reasons, including "disinformation" and public safety. I can find their website on Kagi. I cannot find it on Google.
Whether by the government, or for ideological or fiscal reasons, when I search for information I expect to be given that information. Google is an unreliable source. They all are.
> One litmus test I often use is to search for the Proud Boys. Their website(s) have long been censored for a variety of reasons, including "disinformation" and public safety. I can find their website on Kagi. I cannot find it on Google.
Do you apply this same litmus test to far-left things which Google might have also removed, or do you consider the lack of Google listing the Proud Boys to be some sort of special and unique infringement on freedom of speech? I'm always quite suspicious when somebody cites something that is barely more rational than the ideology of Timothy McVeigh as something that deserves to be read by a wider audience. Do you also complain that your local Barnes and Noble doesn't stock a copy of the Turner Diaries?
> Do you apply this same litmus test to far-left things which Google might have also removed, or do you consider the lack of Google listing the Proud Boys to be some sort of special and unique infringement on freedom of speech?
I consider all censorship wrong. The reason I use the Proud Boys is because it was a well publicised incident and has been a reliable indicator of censorship since then. If you have left wing domains I could include in my litmus test I would be grateful. I'm sure that Yandex censors some of them, which is why I say above: the best way to circumvent censorship is oppositional use.
> I'm always quite suspicious when somebody cites something that is barely more rational than the ideology of Timothy McVeigh as something that deserves to be read by a wider audience. Do you also complain that your local Barnes and Noble doesn't stock a copy of the Turner Diaries?
What a remarkably fast progression from, "what is being censored?" to "here's why it's a good thing." I didn't claim Google has a responsibility to provide uncensored results. I and others are explaining that Google doesn't provide reliably uncensored results, and that that is why providers like Yandex are required to access an uncensored internet.
> Yandex are required to access an uncensored internet.
And if you can read Russian I'm sure you'd find that Yandex is suspiciously missing information about strongly anti-Putin Russians such as the recent writings of Garry Kasparov. Don't pretend it is some bastion of free speech. I still think it's extremely suspicious and very revealing that you immediately jumped to The Proud Boys as your first and best prototypical example of something that's being censored by Google.
> And if you can read Russian I'm sure you'd find that Yandex is suspiciously missing information about strongly anti-Putin Russians such as the recent writings of Garry Kasparov. Don't pretend it is some bastion of free speech.
And if you would do me the courtesy of reading my comments you would see that I am not claiming Yandex to be censorship-free. The exact opposite.
> I still think it's extremely suspicious and very revealing that you immediately jumped to The Proud Boys as your first and best prototypical example of something that's being censored by Google.
You must be easily alarmed. I find it revealing that you haven't provided any censored left wing content which I can add to my test. Instead of engaging with what I am writing, you repeat empty aphorisms and written tics which should best be contained to echo-chambers like Reddit and Bluesky.
Either way it seems you've given up any pretense of caring about the subject of censorship as it applies to search engines.
I detest the Proud Boys for a wide variety of reasons and I really wish that they would just go away.
But if they exist on the web, then I want to have the unfettered liberty to find them on that web and see what they've got to say without having it digested, ruminated and filtered before eventually being regurgitated through someone else's mouthpiece.
You're right, but a fair accounting would probably find that Google is even worse. US misinformation and deception is paralleled only by the Mossad/IDF, who also has Google contracts.
It's entirely worth boycotting all of these companies, if only to protect yourself from their manipulation.
I don't really rely on search engines including Yandex to feed me stories which could be political propaganda - I can readily rely on various news sites to do that. I also just want the results which are links to other sites which may or may not be politically biased.
I'm usually looking for information - generally as an aide to help recall old movies and songs etc, for device info, filling in broad blanks on new consumer everyday stuff I've not encountered that much or looking for precise troubleshooting diagnostic help often found in forums. Lately the main stay search engines are loathed to provide decent diagnostic queries with quality results from forum based help areas - most of the time I know stack exchange results should be higher in number or exist, as well there being a shortage of variety of other forums in the results. It's generally why for the harder queries I end back at Yandex.
Did you see the episode of “The Good Place” where the crew finally convinced God that it was impossible to for humans to reach The Good Place because of the web of interconnected evil that lowkey permeates everything humans do?
I mean, you can’t buy a bottle of water without trampling the rights of indigenous peoples to their water.
To boot, every last Great Power nation is at war all the time. Doesn’t matter if you buy a can of Coke or a Chinese EV, or hell a handmade bespoke bicycle from Europe. You’re funding a war effort somewhere.
So what’s the point exactly? Unless you’re a disingenuous actor trying hard to steer people away from Kagi?
Understandable. Personally, I'm also against that war.
Do you perhaps are also against the Israeli-Palestinian war?
Can you also CATEGORICALLY REFUSE to use any service, government or agency that aids either the acts of genocide from Israel or fuel the terrorist attacks from Hamas?
Wow, pretty cool, much better than being a Clinton fan during the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Thank you for sharing this information, you have now motivated me to purchase Kagi!
I tried Kagi for 2 months and I found myself still reaching for google when it didn't have the results I wanted.
further, a bunch of little stuff was broken here and there (a login screen taking me to search instead of assistant etc.)
I felt the $5 tier was too restrictive and I didn't want to pay even more for something I perceived as not really being good enough.
if I'm paying for a search engine I'd expect it to be a little premium, but it felt like a worse google you'd only use for ideological reasons.
I had the exact opposite experience. Felt very polished and the search results are top notch. For the record, I don’t use any of their blocks. But I do appreciate the lack of AI generated BS in the results!
Bing has been better than google since 2019. Try googling in a fresh browser and see how much personalization contributes to the reranking and query rewriting.
Hey there, Caine from DuckDuckGo here. I understand why you might think this, but it's a myth.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.
Since you're here, can you comment on the problem of SEO spam and what DDG is doing about it? Just today I was looking for instructions on how to replace the cushions on my headphones. I typed into DDG the query "instructions to replace bose headphone pads" and it came up with pages and pages of links to SEO slop. The link to the actual Bose website containing accurate instructions was near the bottom of the second page of results.
At work I can't customise much, like the browser I use, but I did ditch Google/Chrome for Bing/Edge years ago. Not what I would usually recommend, but when work only allows those two options...
On Bing!!!! Sorry, in the back of my mind, bing is that very sad MS search that was terrible at everything :) And it gave you something useful - astonishing.
Bing was never great, but Google has gotten so much worse in the past year or so (ironically, the biggest fall was shortly after they started requiring JS around a year ago) that it's now the better choice. Yahoo is another one I've started using instead.
There are time of options. Some people find their happy place with DDG. Others with Braves Search, Kagi, Firefox. There's dozens to choose from. Opera and Vivaldi probably have search engines now if you are down to change your browser too. It depends on what your priorities are, but there's a search engine out there for you that is better than Google search
Trading using Google for giving money directly to a company that directly funds Russia’s efforts in the Ukraine invasion, that acknowledges and refuses to do anything about it, doesn’t seem like the greatest swap.
A small search engine with a tiny user base is paying another search engine enough that it is paying enough tax on received money to fund a war? How does that make any sense? I also hate the war, I'm not on any side, but this just doesn't make any sense.
You might say directly in a sentence as many times as you want, it doesn't make it the truth. Kagi is not directly supporting Russian military efforts. It is a gross oversimplification.
Yandex pays taxes into the Russian government which is controlling military actions in Ukraine. Is this or is this not true?
Yandex pays taxes based off revenue it takes in from companies like Kagi. Is this or is this not true?
People here who pay into Kagi provide the search engine with the funding to pay Yandex. Is this or is this not true?
You can say it’s “not direct” and it’s an “oversimplification,” but the money still ends up in the same place all the same. You can try to wash your hands of it all you want by playing mental gymnastics.
Willingly paying Kagi knowing this makes you at minimum partially complicit in Russia’s invasion and ethnic cleansing of Ukraine.
I guess then you would also believe that someone who voted for the current president of the US also isn’t directly responsible for the war in Iran, ICE killing US citizens, and the alienation of Canada.
It’s easy to say “I’m not directly responsible” if you’re proxying it through someone else.
Kagi is brilliant. I find the whole Yandex -thing silly (EU spending on liquefied gas etc. from Russia is more than Yandex’s whole annual revenue) and only wish same scrutiny would be put on corporations funding Israel genocides.
I use DDG at work on Firefox with all AI blocked. If I would apart from Kagi, I would use SearXNG locally accessing it elsewhere with Tailscale. I think Hister seems promising, but have not tried it myself yet.
I don't mean their own LLM generated response to the query. I mean websites in the SERP. A lot are auto generated LLM slop. DDG isn't doing anything to filter out this low quality junk from their index.
Not using the A.I. version, though I do have an A.I. assit box up top at times. I've noted more rubbish search results lately -- I feel at at times DDG just doesn't bother to try or has deceased the giving a flaquk setting. My goto has been DDG primarily for about 10 years. I've struck this unhelpful Meh response on and off the last couple months primarily with slightly off the beaten track queries ...often having to go to something I had to do with Google, using quotes around an often common term I really needed the result to include to finally trying to narrow it down quickly defaulting to no results at all - then having to switch back to Google, where Google would surprise me with at least a handful of suitable results.
can confirm as of this morning. last i checked Brave's Leo was slop but i'm sure the models have changed
of course Google / Gemini search is slop as well but it is at least advanced slop. not like whatever Soylent 1.5 Flash that DDG is bringing to the table
Also - capitalism doesn't like "works just fine". We call that stagnation. For better or worse they're going to continue to try to "innovate" new ways of squeezing some KPIs out of their products
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
This is making weird judgements about people just trying to find information.
I don’t have any friends who are code inspectors, so I can’t ask them obscure questions about something that I want to repair in a way that it will be done properly.
I don’t have any friends who are mechanics, and even if they were they probably wouldn’t know what specific part I’d need to fix a specific problem on my old shitbox—they would look it up.
I don’t want half assed guesses to these questions, I want to find the exact correct answer. My friends and I can talk about other stuff that’s not just trading random facts. Trading facts usually makes for poor conversation unless you’re a hobbyist talking shop with another hobbyist.
Now Gemini (and Google) are not good at finding the right answer anymore, so I have to use other sources for that, but I find your judgement about people using search or search LLMs to be misplaced.
What's the worst that can happen if you were to text a friend "Heya mate, bit of a long shot - do you know anyone who can help repair a 1983 Reliant Robin?"
Best case, they know someone or can dig through their contact and help you solve your problem.
Medium case, they text back "No - has your shitbox died again? Can't believe you still have that thing :-)" and you can have a pleasant back and forth.
Worse case, you get a "no". Oh well, at least texts don't cost 12p each any more.
I just think it is nice to chat with your pals. But, sure, stick to scans of old manuals on Archive.org if you just want pure information.
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones.
The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
Yup, and this is my age range.
I guess I should have specified, knowing the average age on HN is... just a little higher to say the least.
But to a progressively lower extent it applies to older generations as well.
you're highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult and everyone's walls had gone up. most of those 4/5 just call their superficial acquaintances "friends". a real friend is essentially a platonic partner, and most people are lucky if they develop even one such friendship in their lifetime. I've lost one to distance and another to marriage, so even though I have "friends", I consider myself to be in the 1/5 too.
There are certainly different degrees of friendship. I might only have one such platonic partner and unfortunately we hardly see each other anymore because we live in different cities and have families. Once in a while we talk on the phone, but when we do it's a minimum 2 hour call.
However, I have several people I would still consider close friends. My personal threshold for true friendship is whether I can comfortably talk about private things.
Back to the study. I don't think it uses such a high threshold as 'platonic partnership'. I found the following paragraph really striking:
"What these numbers also reveal is the hidden depth of the crisis. The 17% with zero friends in 2024 — compared to just 1% in 1990"
Do everybody suddenly get higher standards of friendship? Or did people really get lonelier? I find the second more likely.
> you're highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult
People keep saying this but that's not my experience. First, it depends on how you define adult. I have only one close friend from my school days, but I met most of my best friends at university and I don't think I'm an outlier in this regard. It probably gets harder once you're in your thirties and start a family. But once the kids get older and you have more time for hobbies again, there are still many opportunities to find friends. Maybe it won't be a deep platonic relationship, but at least it's someone who shares your interests and that you can meet and talk to in real life.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.
And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.
I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.
Phones and tech made those people a lot lonelier then they used to be before. Because before, people in hospital naturally socialized with other people in the hospital. So, a loner stuck in the hospital was less lonely. And before, people naturally went out and socialized with those in their environment. Because they were bored alone inside. That created communities.
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly places. (Random sample: I was in New York yesterday and am in Atlanta to-day.)
Most of the South is, too, as well as a surprising majority of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?
When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.
I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.
Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.
To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
Wait wait wait, you are from an older generation, so yes it somewhat (older people here do see each other often even when married, and the middle/high school friends are often for life. moving out? ha) doesn't apply to you.
I am indeed quite a lot younger, and in my personal experience the social skills of many (yes, of course, not all) younger Americans have been absolutely destroyed by the internet and some other things that I can't mention.
Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
> Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I don't see this as unreasonable? I've had friends text me questions about grammar, since they were learning the local language and I knew theirs, so they knew I'd be a good sanity check. Similarly, I'm the go tech support for my friend group for anything that a cursory Google search can't solve (and I assume a lot of people here are in the same situation with friends and family). I've also been asked to find 'that one image' that similarly didn't show up on Google image search for whatever reason.
Neither of these cases seem unreasonable to me. Are they to you, or do you have other cases in mind? Or is the problem that this happens too often?
What's the difference between 'Texting your friends for factual information' and 'Simple factual queries with not intention of connection'? You've said they're different, that second is reasonable and the first is not, but they read the same to me.
query: "What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey" AI answer: There are actually no real memes about "Dario staying in Turkey."This specific phrase is a famous example of a "natural language search query" used to describe how everyday people try to search the internet.A recent discussion on Hacker News highlighted this exact phrase to contrast how human search behavior has changed:"
THEN IT LINKS TO THIS THREAD?!
I need to go take a walk.