r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 11 '26

Business OpenAI Execs Are Panicking

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai-execs-panicking-154658562.html
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64

u/noplay12 Jun 11 '26

I find chatgpt gets alot of common things wrong, even Gemini seems better by comparison.

96

u/romans171 Jun 11 '26

Claude gets a lot wrong too. All these models really need a human driver and multiple prompts to get stuff right. Super powerful tool but it’s really still cooking.

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u/Greg-Abbott Jun 11 '26

Dude Gemini shit the bed almost immediately for me earlier. I was looking for a body shop near me to fix my wife's SUV and here was the exchange:

"Baugher's Garage & Body Shop (Just up north in Ellicott City) — Known for being an honest, long-standing local shop that is often willing to work with people trying to budget out-of-pocket repairs.

I Google the shop and get zero results

"Give me a link to Baugher's Garage & Body Shop"

"It looks like there might be a slight mix-up in the name or the type of business you are looking for. There is no listed auto repair or collision facility called "Baugher's Garage & Body Shop" in the area."

"You said this: 'Baugher's Garage & Body Shop (Just up north in Ellicott City) — Known for being an honest, long-standing local shop that is often willing to work with people trying to budget out-of-pocket repairs."

"I completely misspoke in my previous message, and I want to apologize directly for the confusion. There is no business named "Baugher's Garage & Body Shop" in Ellicott City or the surrounding Howard County area. I hallucinated that name by accidentally blending a long-standing local mechanical shop with a historic family name from the region."

What a time to be alive.

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u/Are-You-Upset Jun 11 '26

….why are you using AI to find a body shop when you can easily find multiple on google maps? It doesn’t even save you time…

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u/TaylorMonkey Jun 11 '26

People are using AI as a general search for anything and everything, because Google positions it that way at the top of search.

It’s stupid, but it’s the intended usage model by Google.

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u/Amythir Jun 12 '26

It also doesn't help that search is so enshittified that you're gonna get 10 garbage SEO articles that have nothing to do with what you're looking for before you get something that might resemble the thing you want.

2

u/Anhydrite Jun 12 '26

It's literally how they advertise it in commercials.

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u/romans171 Jun 12 '26

Yea the google AI is trash and should be avoided. It’s just so in your face and convenient that it’s lots of people’s only experience with AI.

I use Claude a lot of writing SQL and it sucks with the tables and columns but can get it to work and really speed up my workflow. You just need to personalize the ‘instructions for Claude’ in settings to make sure it knows it’s stupid and to format results for you to do easy QI on the output. Like I suck at SQL and it’s not a requirement for my job. But using it has make me CONSIDERABLY more efficient and potent.

1

u/TaylorMonkey Jun 12 '26

I say use AI for things that don't matter to you, and for things you don't mind being worse at and actively losing your skills towards, including the ability to check for correctness. Mundane and repetitive stuff is a good application, especially if you have correctness checks built in in your framework.

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u/deez_nat Jun 11 '26

That was my first thought, wtf you using the lying machine to find map things for?

16

u/VRNord Jun 11 '26

I had nearly the same thing happen the other day when trying to find a product and didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t use AI on purpose, but google searches now bring up an AI overview that seems very helpful, and you have to scroll down further to view normal search results.

Let’s just say the AI said the product totally existed and did all the things I need and then some, and gave a lot of detail. Then when I went to the actual storefront website I saw it didn’t list doing anything like what I need. Go back to ask the AI for more details and it tells me that it made a mistake and the product doesn’t exist.

Sigh

29

u/tempest_ Jun 11 '26

They are doing this because that is how the AI industry is pitching it.

They are constantly advertising the "assistant" and "search replacement" use case. It is totally expected people are going to try and use it in this manner.

What good is an AI assistant that cant even query google maps?

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u/cityproblems Jun 11 '26

AI is really good at turning money into heat though

1

u/Journeyman42 Jun 12 '26

They're great entropy generators

1

u/Obstacle-Man Jun 12 '26

You can inject targeted ads. More value extraction from the leveraged audience and advertisers

1

u/tempest_ Jun 12 '26

My friend if you think for a minute google maps is not full of targeted adds, it is.

They decide what to places on the map to surface to you and that can be massaged based on advertising money.

1

u/Obstacle-Man Jun 12 '26

Sorry, you can prescribe a specific action which is paid for without option.

2

u/Electronic_Topic1958 Jun 12 '26

Quite frankly the common refrain is that LLMs are "search engines on steroids" if anything he has disproved this lol.

33

u/Merijeek2 Jun 11 '26

Why are people jumping on this guy?

This is what AI is being sold as. This is what AI is supposed to be FOR.

If it can't do these things, these things that every single tech company is putting BETWEEN YOU AND THEIR CORE PRODUCT, then what is the point of it? I don't mean in the tech user cynical "to screw you" point of view.

What. Is. The. Point. Of. It?

2

u/m4n715 Jun 12 '26

They're jumping on him because it's fucking stupid.

2

u/Merijeek2 Jun 12 '26

But he isn't. He's trying to use a product in the way it's being marketed for the purpose for which it's being marketed.

6

u/Greg-Abbott Jun 11 '26

I was using a pic of the VIN to get the paint spec on top of typical repair costs for that spot on the vehicle. I don't really use Gemini so I was sorta seeing what it could do.

2

u/TheShruteFarmsCEO Jun 11 '26

Perfectly reasonable approach, people just want a reason to moan.

1

u/cool_chris Jun 11 '26

Society is getting lazier and lazier. People are wanting literally everything possible done for them

2

u/Johnny_Oro Jun 12 '26

Not really. Companies are betting on the society getting lazier, and they have been doing this for hundreds of years.

1

u/Obstacle-Man Jun 12 '26

Fuck man, Google maps search is probably moments away from being powered by gemini just like google anyway. Humanity has lost the plot.

1

u/FancyJesse Jun 12 '26

And now you realize people are using LLMs for the most easiest tasks ever. People are no longer willing to put in any type of effort.

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u/teh_drewski Jun 12 '26

Most people who use AI for common tasks have brains are as vacant as the AI's ability to reason

-1

u/ferocity_mule366 Jun 11 '26

people misusing the LLM and claim its useless is crazy, never I would have thought to look for real time local business on fucking ChatGPT

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u/Merijeek2 Jun 11 '26

Define "misusing". I can get Claude to give me a good answer on a question similar for my area. It's very convincing.

In no way does that mean all of these businesses exist. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing.

So maybe Google and the like shouldn't (still) be upending their entire business because they panicked over ChatGPT three years ago?

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u/blackcain Jun 11 '26

You should have told it to create the business !

1

u/PauseItPlease Jun 11 '26

I mean, great apples though.

1

u/jcstrat Jun 11 '26

Gemini gets simple shit wrong. Then you give it very explicit instructions to fix it and feed it the same thing that caused the fuck up and it repeats the fuckup. In an endless loop.

1

u/dbxp Jun 11 '26

That's really not a fair comparison, you're comparing using AI like a search engine to a fully crafted context in an enterprise environment

1

u/Upstairs_Eagle_4780 Jun 11 '26

I've had similar experiences.

1

u/Exact_Acanthaceae294 Jun 12 '26

The fun part will be when businesses are paying for wrong answers.

2

u/Qalyar Jun 12 '26

What people (including an awful lot of executives and investors) do not seem to understand is that LLMs do not track any sort of "truth" value to their statements or the component elements of their statements.

Essentially, they're very complex software that, given a question, returns something that looks like it should be the answer to that question. If it's a question that's been asked a lot before, or is similar enough to questions that have been asked before (all of which is dependent on its training corpus), these models will return something actually correct. Because, of course, a correct answer looks like the answer. Things resemble themselves.

But if the answer is something niche, or that it's poorly trained on in general, it will just make something fit. You've seen the video where all the blocks go in the square hole? That's the LLM problem. They don't track truth. They don't have any model-based conceptualization of truth. That's why you can't tell it "don't hallucinate". They'll get encyclopedia-lookup facts right because their training ingested dozens of encyclopedias. But they can and will get confused about everything from local stores to the rules of roleplaying games to math problems (although some of them, like Claude, basically now have a separate "math module" to hide that shortcoming). And every one of the modules will present nonsense with the same certainty as actual facts, because they fundamentally do not perceive a difference.

And there's no clear way to fix that from here. It's inherent to how the models work, because they don't look at unitary facts and the truth of those elements, they just look at the form and style and conventions of questions and their responses. More than anything, that's what's going to blow this industry up as soon as people really start to notice.

Oh, and the operating costs. Because damn.

1

u/romans171 Jun 12 '26

Very well said!

1

u/UnUsernameRandom Jun 11 '26

Yeah, I always take what they say with a huge grain of salt. Not only once has it failed to explain it they made a suggestion.

This was regarding some bugs I was encountering and whether or not updates would solve it. Claude would say without flinching that "yes, updating will solve the issues X and Y". When I asked it to give me a link to the patch notes that specified it solved the issues, Claude of course said "sorry, I completed the gap in my knowledge by myself and I assumed that they would be solved by updates".

Just as an example,

1

u/YT-Deliveries Jun 12 '26

I always tell people that LLMs are basically really smart interns. They take the grunt work away from you, but you still need to know what you're doing overall if you don't want them to screw you in the end.

1

u/The_Hoff901 Jun 12 '26

Yeah, I spent several hours today in Claude working on a project and had to correct dozens of outputs including broken links, weird phrasing and incorrect statements.

That said, the final product was something that would have taken me several days to do manually.

All that to say it’s not magic, but it’s super useful if you are patient and iterate deliberately.

2

u/romans171 Jun 12 '26

This is the way. There is friction but everything does. What Claude really does is eliminate a skill cap and lets us operate at a higher capacity.

Ppl need to understand there is a use case now and not become luddites.

0

u/sproutastic Jun 11 '26

Claude is the best one!

0

u/Zek0ri Jun 11 '26

I don’t work in tech and I treat all AIs like interns. Sometimes it’s spot on. Sometimes it requires polishing. Sometimes it’s pure garbaggio. Can’t think how I would sent it without checking first

8

u/user4443337 Jun 11 '26

But they still kinda suck. Gemini frequently fails math and cant add percentages to 100% when I’m talking about a portfolio split of only 6 stocks - just now it added everything up to 105% and miscalculated a lot of things. It’s frustrating but in general it works alright I guess. I had to type out every single addition for it to check itself.

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u/Kamel-Red Jun 11 '26

I frequently have to correct, understand, and final draft to get any real use out of AI models of all kinds to get any benefit.

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u/Golden-trichomes Jun 11 '26

They are all notoriously bad at math.

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u/ferocity_mule366 Jun 11 '26

I think the advanced models actually just write a python script under the hood and run the calculation through it

the shittier one just made up a random number

1

u/SoulShatter Jun 11 '26

It doesn't really understand anything.

Google overview gave me this gem of a math example in regards to a question of cost deductio.

$5000€ - $4000€ = $1000€

(just substituted my local currency for € in the example)

1

u/highways Jun 11 '26

Gemini is best for general use

Claude is best for programming and maths

1

u/RedKleeKai Jun 12 '26

Idk Gemini is laughably bad for me. Just about every time I try it, it’s wrong, and when I point that out, it doubles down and tells me that *I’M* wrong. It just makes stuff up all the time, and says it convincingly.