Analysis: Gemini 3-based AI Overviews are accurate ~90% of the time, meaning across 5T+ searches per year, tens of millions of answers are erroneous every hour
The company's A.I.-generated answers look authoritative, but they draw on an array of sources, from trustworthy sites to Facebook posts.
New York Times
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Discussion
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@hern
Alex Hern
on bluesky
speak of the devil bsky.app/profile/tech... [embedded post]
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@daniloc.xyz
@daniloc.xyz
on bluesky
Had someone come in to a library help shift asking “how to turn off all the AI.” So I dutifully twiddled the various Windows registry values to do so, handing it back to her to verify. She immediately did a Google search. the one bit of AI she wanted gone I couldn't help with […
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@hern
Alex Hern
on bluesky
continue to think that Google, which arguably has the best AI models in the market, deliberately filling its search results with responses from with the dumbest models it makes is one of the worst strategic decisions in the sector so far [embedded post]
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@jackcarterbenjamin
Jack Benjamin
on bluesky
“It was spitting out the stuff from my website as though it was God's own truth.” — How accurate are AI Overviews? Well, let me tell you, an entire cottage industry within marketing has sprung up to influence its results. — So, in other words, not trustworthy at all. www.nyt…
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@ronaldjcoleman
Ronald J. Coleman
on bluesky
“Today's A.I. systems use mathematical probabilities to guess the best response, not a strict set of rules defined by human engineers. That means they make a certain number of mistakes.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...
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@metacurity.com
Cynthia Brumfield
on bluesky
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t... Not accurate enough to trust them
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@emollick
Ethan Mollick
on x
This article is a case study of why measuring AI performance is so hard. AI Overviews make mistakes. But the same mistakes are in Wikipedia. But the sources are harder to find when using AI. But the AI answers may be better than most people would find. Unclear what it all means. …
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@mikeisaac
Rat King
on x
at the end of the day it always comes back to scale even with a 99.9 percent accuracy rate, .1 percent is still a huge number applies to every big tech co
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@mikeisaac
Rat King
on x
glass half full: 90 percent accuracy is an impressive accuracy rate glass half empty: 10 percent error rate for a company that does more than 5 Trillion search queries per year is still a gigantic number https://www.nytimes.com/... [image]
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@garymarcus
Gary Marcus
on x
Imagine if your car randomly went out of control 10% of the time. That's commercial-grade generative AI web search.
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@jessefelder.com
Jesse Felder
on bluesky
‘AI Overviews face another challenge: They can be manipulated. If someone wants to be known as a world expert at something, he or she merely has to write a blog post self-proclaiming that distinction.’ www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t... [image]
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r/technology
r
on reddit
Testing suggests Google's AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour
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@alexavee.me
Alexandra Vitenberg
on bluesky
90% accuracy" sounds great until it's the thing replacing the entire web's worth of human-verified answers.