No, that’s google. A leaked memo indicates that they deliberately made search worse so people would have to search twice and see twice the number of ads
AI companies lose money every time someone uses it. Even those that charge per-token
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
160 points (90.4% liked)
Showerthoughts
43729 readers
438 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I refuse to use a computer or browser without ublock origin. No fucking way I'm accepting that poisonous shit they call ads.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Omg please link
This is the entire business model for most if not all of tech really
If it worked they could be profitable already instead of continuing to burn billions of investment dollars.
They're burning billions because they're trying to rush ahead of the competition in capabilities. No matter how good LLMs get, that is not their goal. They're trying to reach AGI and there are no second places in that race.
Thinking that LLMs will ever become AGI is fucking hysterical, and that is what the shills keep saying is going to happen. They are trying to turn lead into gold using a stove and a skillet.
No money they have dumped into LLMs is going to contribute to something that could achieve AGI. They are running the wrong race.
load more comments
(3 replies)
There is no AGI. Whatever they reach, there will always be a next level.
In the 1980s if you said you could make a computer play Go better than the best human masters, there are those who would have said "that would be true artificial intelligence." Then it happened, and the world moved on.
There was a time when a computer understanding speech, translating languages, would have been considered true artificial intelligence, then we got there, and the world moved on.
LLMs have solved a mathematical question left open with prize money for decades unsolved by humans (just one, really, that I know of, so far...), but that's not AGI yet...
Many forms of "the Turing Test" are being passed by LLMs tested against the majority of the general population now, but apparently that's not AGI yet...
AGI will continue to be a moving goalpost, as it should be. It's not a finish line, it's a journey. Even when automated systems are building themselves from raw material inputs, designing and building their own infrastructure, power plants, communications, and continuously improving their own designs, there will be those who still design new tests for "AGI" that they don't pass, yet.
AI and AGI are not synonymous terms. We've had AI since 1956. General intelligence means human-level intelligence. When an AI system can do any task as well as or better than humans can, it's by definition generally intelligent.
We're not changing the definitions. People thought that chess is so hard that once an AI system can play chess it has to be as intelligent as humans. That just turned out to be a false assumption. A system can be superhuman at playing chess but that ability doesn't need to translate to any other field.
General intelligence means human-level intelligence.
Applicable quote from a Yosemite park ranger: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
We’re not changing the definitions. People thought that chess is so hard... That just turned out to be a false assumption
Sounds like changing definitions to me.
A system can be superhuman at playing chess but that ability doesn’t need to translate to any other field.
AlphaZero has been superhuman at playing chess, Go, and basically any game with perfect information and fixed rules since early 2018. That's translatable to other fields - it's not as strong in some fields as it is in playing Go, but it's still translatable ability...
Sounds like changing definitions to me.
But it's not. It's a hypothesis that was proven incorrect by running the experiment.
That’s translatable to other fields
I didn't say it doesn't ever translate to other fields. I said that it doesn't need to. That's the difference between narrow and general intelligence. You can be superhuman at X but have zero clue how to do Y. It's still intelligence but it's not general or "human level"
I think they know AGI is far off, and are setting a more medium term goal. I think they are just trying to corner the new LLM market that might emerge. Even if the bubble pops and 3/4 go bust, they hope to be the one that survives and gets to be the quasi-monopoly in that market for the next decade.
load more comments
(4 replies)
That is just utter bullshit. Hallucinations are a by-product of how LLMs work under the hood, not an intentional design choice. An AI that doesn't make mistakes would be orders of magnitude more profitable.
The prevalence of hallucination in LLMs is a design choice. It is a result of raising the 'temperature' which is just fancy speak for randomization so it doesn't spit out the same text for the same question over and over to make it look like it has nuance and whatever.
If it was consistent they would be able to reduce incorrect results, but they want it to look like a human response.
Can you provide sources to “they want it to look like a human response?”
I have not read about that before.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Mistakes are part of the human process... an automaton which produces only one solution for a problem is easily stuck, trapped, dead-ended. Building imperfect solution candidates and improving them until they are acceptable is how humans have designed things since forever. There are no perfect answers to the questions that matter.
You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for.
from Don't Look Up.
I partially agree with the idea that AI is the same as industrial revolution. Yes, AI is just as revolutionary as steam engine.
Except we are currently at the stage steam engine was in ancient Greece and Roman Empire - a curiosity too expensive to use for value it provides and too crude to provide anything better.
Luckily ancient times didn't have billionaires playing speculative gambling on economy by trying to push any new thing as something revolutionizing right now.
Let the AI flop now, wait a few centuries and it will return better.
Better in terms of using less resources would be great.
AI will cause next productivity revolution when demand for things that AI can make will heavily outweigh supply created by human workforce. This is not the case now. We automated work of artists, people we generally joke about being unneeded beggars.
Industrial revolution happened because demand for goods was so big, people would rather buy mediocre factory-made things than artisan-made high quality goods. Common folk currently do not have enough money to spend on frivolous things AI makes.
And when we're done fixing, we're unnecessary and have time to eat the rich \o/
One can dream .. why not replace billionaires with AI too?
The thing about money - the only thing money is actually good for is: manipulating the behavior of humans.
You can't eat it, but you can get people to give you food in exchange for it. Money doesn't grow food, but it does get people to do the work of growing and harvesting and shipping and preparing food...
Money doesn't build your house, but it does get people to build a house for you. It doesn't make electricity, but it does get people to build and operate electrical generation systems...
So, what are Billionaires? They're actually just power-centers of people manipulation by money.
This is inaccurate. What's currently happening is that the AI companies are throwing away money because they're riding the bubble.
What they pretend they'll be able to sell is a replacement employee. Of course we've seen that in most fields, AI is not nearly good enough to replace us, and probably in most fields it never will be.
What you're pointing out is one way to generate more consumption of AI, and that would be monetizable if AI were actually making money on queries. But right now it's losing money on those queries.
Also, when you get used to relying on ai, you lose the practice and forget part fo your knowledge and skills. So, if you try to stop using ai, you will first have a steep decrease in productivity as you have to resharp your skills and remember a lot of stuff, and that creates a barrier preventing people from going out
Jesus, people, AI has barely been usable for a year - do you all forget your years of study and practice if the coffee breaks are too long, too?
Many people will have already forgotten what they studied in the first semesters when they finish the course lol
WIthout constant practice, most people's skills get rusty in a faster rate than we can imagine
In the 1980s I worked at a factory where the joke was "why are coffee breaks only 15 minutes long?" "Because when we give 'em 30 minutes for lunch we have to retrain them before they start work again after lunch."
Unless you pay more for the better model, then it makes slightly less mistakes.
The "better models" have been interesting to watch progress over the past year. I'd say the free to use models today are better than the best that were available a year ago. The ones with bigger context windows use more resources, and sometimes can give better results, often not. In LLMs, management of what is, and is not, in the context window seems to be the key to the kinds of results you get, and it feels like they have been "learning" to self-manage their context windows quite a bit better over the past 12 months.
I agree. Over time I have learned to be a lot more careful with the context window and periodically start over to keep it small. This was one of the reasons I left the free ChatGPT, it seemed to have a very small context window and was not graceful at all about going outside it. Gemini free tier was a lot more graceful about this. I think the advantage of the paid tiers is simply that they will try to manage for longer and report to you how big your context window has gotten. So you have more time and you know when to start thinking about starting from scratch again.
I haven't tried lately, several months ago I tried asking the chatbots directly: What's the size of your context window. Gemini answered straight out: "32,767 tokens, and that's not as good for developing complex software as a larger context window like Claude Sonnet's 200,000 tokens."
Gemini is 1 million now. But you should probably stop before then. And yes, it's surprisingly honest about whether it's the right model for your needs. It's recommended me to go with Claude for some of my projects.
Back when Sonnet was 200K and Opus was 1M, there were a lot of complex programming projects where I actually got better overall results out of Sonnet... but, go back to the 3.x days and Sonnet got stuck in debug loops fairly often where Opus would break out of the loop and find a working solution more often.
and then fix the new mistakes it made while trying to fix the old ones and
Not to be that guy, but that's some weak ass strawman bullshit.
Surely you can think of a more solid point of critisism than whatever that was.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I don't need a machine to make mistakes. 😤
"Drug companies sell drugs to make you more sick!" vibes.
view more: next ›