Google didn’t launch LLM products despite being a tech leader, and have gotten piles of bad press for their misleading AI search summaries. They know how and why they suck. Google search is a highly popular and market facing service packaging bad summaries as “AI”. Meanwhile LLM searches threaten to disrupt Googles primary cash cow (advertising around search).

Here on HN, on Reddit, and media writ large, a lot of the “AI” failure stories are not about ChatGPT hallucinations, it’s the shockingly wrong search summaries from Google, undermining consumer confidence and breaching trust.

ChatGPT and other LLM providers rarely show conflicting source material side by side with misleading text gen. The number one search provider who leads in some LLM tech does though, routinely, looking incompetent and generating negative “AI” sentiment through repeated failures at mass scale…

So the theory here is either that the best search org in the world filled with geniuses can’t tell they’re pooping on their own product and profitability and aren’t fixing it because they can’t/won’t… … or <tinfoil mode engaged>… Google already makes money and is happy with substandard product and market performance in the cases where it hurts the necessary hype critical to other businesses but not themselves (while also pre-positioning in case LLM search becomes essential).

Win/win/win strategy with a substandard product, versus Google not being aware of what their biggest product is doing.

Googles AI summaries are doing lotsa work to make AI summaries seem terrible. I ascribe profit motives to their actions. Ascribing incompetence seems naive and irreconcilable with their strategic corporate history.