Encrypt-Keeper

Sounds like hotseat. A remnant of the good old days.

Actually as much as I’d love to use Firefox all the time, there are many times it won’t work properly at all. This isn’t entirely Mozilla’s fault, but it is the case.

The problem is that the sales pitch of these AI answering services in search engines is to save you time from having to open search results and read them yourself. The problem with 80-90% accuracy is that if the summaries are hallucinated even once, you can no longer trust them implicitly, so in all cases you now have to verify what it says by opening search results and reading them yourself. It’s a convenience feature that doesn’t offer you any actual convenience.

Sure it’s impressive that they are accurate 80-90% of their time, but AI used in this context is of no actual value.

I was just talking about this with someone the other day. While it’s truly remarkable what AI can do, its margin for error is just too big for most if not all of the use cases companies want to use it for.

For example, I use the Hoarder app which is a site bookmarking program, and when I save any given site, it feeds the text into a local Ollama model which summarizes it, conjures up some tags, and applies the tags to it. This is useful for me, and if it generates a few extra tags that aren’t useful, it doesn’t really disrupt my workflow at all. So this is a net benefit for me, but this use case will not be earning these corps any amount of profit.

On the other end, you have Googles Gemini that now gives you an AI generated answer to your queries. The point of this is to aggregate data from several sources within the search results and return it to you, saving you the time of having to look through several search results yourself. And like 90% of the time it actually does a great job. The problem with this is the goal, which is to save you from having to check individual sources, and its reliability rate. If I google 100 things and Gemini correctly answers 99 of those things accurate abut completely hallucinates the 100th, then that means that all 100 times I have to check its sources and verify that what it said was correct. Which means I’m now back to just… you know… looking through the search results one by one like I would have anyway without the AI.

So while AI is far from useless, it can’t now and never will be able to be relied on for anything important, and that’s where the money to be made is.