As I mentioned above, if you’re making a niche query, maybe. If you’re making a very generic query “average temperature in Hong Kong in January”, it’s fine. You’re overestimating average complexity of a query.

"Fine" may be "right 95% of the time" but I'll look like a jackass 5% of the time that I trust the Google AI Overview.

And I won't know which ones are the wrong ones, so I may as well trust it 0% of the time.

Most people I know use AI Overview now as their primary way of doing any sort of research or question-answering... and I urge them: If getting an LLM take is suitable for your purpose, at least ask free-tier ChatGPT, which is at least an order of magnitude less likely to vomit up false or confused information. Also, asking actual Gemini is another sane option that is far superior to AI Overview.

Does it really matter that much? Did it matter that everyone's parents pre-internet were wrong half of the time?

Most people are not asking google to build them a train signaling system but to look up some question on Wikipedia for which the answer does not matter that much

If that’s the case, those people should just install a 7M param model on their phones and use that. It’s probably as accurate, but works offline.

Sure but that is harder than pressing a button or saying hey Google. It requires you to think, make a UI, etc.

Think of the incentives and the path of absolute least resistance/thinking/energy use and you will arrive at the product people want.

I think you can press a button + say "Hey Siri" at this point (though that assumes Siri works at all, which I agree is a stretch.)

7M param doesn’t do web searches for you. Otherwise, yeah?

7M is fine if you don't care about the quality/correctness of the output and just want some utterance that looks plausibly related to the question. I guess that is the bar this thread has set for Google search quality being good enough for most users.

> Does it really matter that much?

Does truth matter in the post-truth world where disclaiming truthful news about you is as easy as calling it fake?

Interesting, I had terrible experience with ChatGPT as search not-so while back, found gemini quite useful for finding out the articles and brainstorming information.