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Re:Google changes its search box by youre-wrong3 on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:13PM (#48199740)
> the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time

Highly doubtful.

Re:Google changes its search box by qurren on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:17PM (#48199777)
Depends on what you ask. It's pretty easy to get wrong information.

e.g. search for "how do you make money with options"

Google's AI says

"When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down."

Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.

Re:Google changes its search box by 9dev on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:58PM (#48200232)
Is that really categorically wrong, or is it a correct-enough explanation for laypeople looking for a one-sentence answer?
Re:Google changes its search box by neltnerb on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @06:24PM (#48200500)
It's wild to me that someone looking for advice on how to do any kind of stock trading would be looking for a once sentence answer.

I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?

It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.

I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.

Re:Google changes its search box by jesse_ash on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @07:10PM (#48200895)
Those looking for a one sentence answer will be the quickest to invest. When people talk about the harms of AI, this is the kind of thing that comes to mind first for me.
Re:Google changes its search box by qurren on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @06:39PM (#48200649)
It is, in fact, categorically wrong, and misleads beginners to make bad decisions. Robinhood is notably bad for promoting this kind of gambling behavior on its platforms; they also state the same misinformation (that you buy a call if you think something is going to go up, when it is in fact a bet that it is going to go up more than a certain amount in a certain period of time).

People shoot themselves in the foot because they think NVDA is going to go up after earnings, buy call options, and then even though the stock goes up they lose money because they did not understand IV crush.

People looking for one-sentence explanations should really not be playing with options. In finance you should understand what you're buying thoroughly. If you just want to bet that "NVDA goes up", you should just buy NVDA stock; that is the trade that accurately captures that bet.

Re:Google changes its search box by al_borland on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:55PM (#48200202)
I tried this search. It gave a write up about buying and selling options, noting that the price of the stock had to move significantly, not just go up or down. It also talked about vertical spreads and iron condors. It touches on delta, theta, and volatility and their impacts, as well as leverage risk and potential uncapped risk.

While I agree that AI gets things wrong a lot, and someone should read significantly more before getting into actually trading options, this does give a decent overview to give a layperson an idea of what they are, and some key terms on what to look for if they want to dive deeper. That said, with this info alone, there are some sharp edges that would leave the person open to unnecessary risk if they went on this information alone.

Re:Google changes its search box by goalieca on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @06:25PM (#48200506)
And this is yet another problem, it's stochastic. And often it's self-contradicting even within the same response. What else do you expect from a language model which essentially predicts tokens.
Re:Google changes its search box by ellenhp on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @08:24PM (#48201493)
They probably update these answers offline. I tried "how do you profit from options" and got:

> Call Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go up. If the stock rises past your strike price, the option's value increases, allowing you to sell it for a profit or exercise it to buy the stock at a discount.

> Put Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go down. If the stock falls below your strike price, you profit.

Which leaves me wondering if changing the search textually busts some cache that they update using a slower/smarter model.

Re:Google changes its search box by ddalex on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:26PM (#48199908)
In fact, more then what the call seller expects, not the market.
Re:Google changes its search box by apsurd on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:30PM (#48199950)
This is the problem with teaching and learning. Everything is wrong to some extent. I used to be this way but I don't have a better approach.

Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.

Re:Google changes its search box by qurren on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @06:52PM (#48200748)
The serious answer is in the non-AI-summarized world, you can choose whose information to read and trust.

If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage.

I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.

Re:Google changes its search box by tick_tock_tick on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @09:20PM (#48201875)
Honestly Google's AI answer is about as right if not more right then your answer.

You can easily make money buying a call without the stock price moving a single cent (IV increases). Funny enough the stock can even go down and with a large enough IV increase you still make money.

Re:Google changes its search box by gravatron on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @08:20AM (#48206518)
I used this exact search in Google's AI, plus 3 other LLM models, and not a single one simplified options down to anything like the one sentence example you provided. In fact, they all provided multiple paragraphs of information on the basics on option buying and selling, and provided links for learning more.

Funny enough, the LLM's prove to be more trustworthy than the the posters here on HN like you who are full of shit.

Re:Google changes its search box by ChoGGi on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:32PM (#48199969)
95% closer to your expectations?
Re:Google changes its search box by a1o on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:42PM (#48200087)
It hallucinates greatly about many things when I ask about C++ things. Things that you can easily find the right answer in cppreference or by just inspecting headers in your own IDE.
Re:Google changes its search box by youre-wrong3 on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @08:34PM (#48201565)
Yeah it’s not 2023 anymore. So no it’s not hallucinating like you think it is.
Re:Google changes its search box by dylan604 on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:17PM (#48199779)
What, you think it's actually higher too?
Re:Google changes its search box by youre-wrong3 on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @08:35PM (#48201573)
If you think ai is getting answers wrong at anything close to the frequency quoted then it calls into question your usage and ability to use ai in general.
Re:Google changes its search box by juancb on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @08:50PM (#48201664)
That has the be the most hacker news way of saying "skill issue," I have seen to date.
Re:Google changes its search box by tveita on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @06:45AM (#48205685)
I can get a really high hit rate by only searching for dumb trivial things I already know the answer to.