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Social media is abuzz with examples of Google’s AI Overview product saying weird stuff, from telling users to put glue on their pizza to suggesting they eat rocks. The messy rollout means Google is racing to manually disable AI Overviews for specific searches as various memes posted, which is why users are seeing so many of them disappear shortly after being posted to social networks.It’s an odd situation, since Google has been testing AI Overviews for a year the feature launched in beta in May 2023 as the Search Generative Experience and CEO Sundar Pichai has said the company served over a queries in that time. But Pichai has also said that Google’s brought the of delivering AI answers down by 80 percent over that same time, “driven by hardware, engineering and technical breakthroughs.” It appears that kind of optimization might have happened too early, before the tech was ready.“A company once known for being at the cutting edge and shipping high-quality stuff is known for low-quality output that’s getting meme’d,” one AI founder, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Verge.Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users. “Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce,” Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said in an email to The Verge. Farnsworth also confirmed that the company is “taking swift AI Overviews on certain queries “where appropriate under our content policies, and using these examples to develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.” Gary Marcus, an AI expert and an emeritus professor of neural science at NewYork University, told The Verge that a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80 percent correct to 100 percent. Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing.“You actually need to do some reasoning to decide: is this thing plausible? Is this source legitimate? You have to do things like a fact checker might do, that actually might require artificial general intelligence,” Mar7Brurl%7Dcus said. And Marcus and Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun both agree that the large language models that power current AI systems like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s will not be what creates AGI. Look, it’s a tough spot for Google to be in. Bing went big on AI before Google did with Satya Nadella’s famous “we made them dance” OpenAI is reportedly working on its own, a fresh AI search startup is already worth and a younger generation of users who just want experience are switching to TikTok. The company is clearly feeling the pressure to compete, and pressure is what makes for messy AI releases. Marcus points out that in 2022, Meta released an AI system called Galactica that had to be taken down shortly after its launch because, among other things, it told people to eat glass. Sounds familiar. Google has grand plans for AI Overviews — the feature as it exists is just a tiny slice of what the company announced last week. Multistep reasoning for complex queries, the ability to generate an AI-organized results page, video search in Google Lens — there’s a lot of ambition. But right the company’s reputation hinges on just getting the basics right, and it’s not looking. “These models are constitutionally incapable of doing sanity checking on their own work, and that’s what’s come to bite this industry in the behind,” Marcus said. “We’re going to rebuild our cities into beacons of hope, safety and beauty – better than they have ever been before,” he said during a recent speech to the National Rifle Association in what has become a common refrain on the campaign trail. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation, Washington DC.” Trump has for years railed against cities, particularly those run by Democratic officials, as hotbeds for crime and moral decay. He called Atlanta a “record setting Murder and Violent Crime War Zone” last year, a similar claim he makes frequently about various cities. His allies have an idea of how to capitalize on that agenda and make cities in Trump’s image, detailed in the conservative Project 2025: unleash police forces on cities like Washington DC, withhold federal disaster and emergency grants unless they follow immigration policies like detaining undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative an extensive document breaking down each part of the federal government and recommending changes to be made to advance rightwing policy, was created by the Heritage Foundation, with dozens of conservative organizations and prominent names contributing chapters based on their backgrounds.This part of the project is another Republican attempt at a crackdown on so-called “sanctuary” cities, places around the country that don’t cooperate with the federal government on enforcing harsh immigration policies. Washington DC, in particular, has taken up residence in Trump’s stump speech, where he rails against the city for crime, graffiti and general mismanagement. He vows that the federal government will take over the city and run it. Project 2025 posits a way to do this: use the Secret Service. The service’s police force, the Uniformed Division, doesn’t have the ability to enforce laws outside the White House and its immediate surrounding area, the project says. But that could change.“As the District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction and currently is beholden to the trend of progressive pro-crime policies, UD officers should enforce applicable laws,” Project 2025 says. “The result would be to allow UD officers to gain more law enforcement experience an attractive credential that would improve morale.” Trump’s allies in Congress have already been taking aim at DC, with Arizona’s Republican US representative Andy Biggs saying he’d support a federal takeover of the city to enforce laws and the Florida representative Byron Donalds pushing a bill to put Congress in charge of some DC criminal laws. The US House also will reverse a DC policy that allows non-citizens to vote in local elections, a pet issue nationwide for Republicans this election year. Middle-aged white man in blue suit speaks into microphone at table as he gestures.The anti-DC sentiment is predicated on crime which, after reaching a peak in 2023, is down this year compared with last year, DC police data shows. In a speech to the National Rifle Association earlier this month, Trump went on about what he’s seen in DC lately that justifies a federal takeover. “I was there recently on a court case, of course. I so many court cases,” he said. “And I’m driving into a federal courthouse, and the graffiti over the place is. It’s staggering. The roads are full of potholes. The medians in the middle, you know, the guardrails, are broken and some of them laying, literally laying, in the street. The garbage is piled up and disgusting, cans are laying there for many months.”So it’s time for a change, he says: “We’re going to make our capital strong again. We’re going to run our capital, we’re going to take our capital over by the federal government, it’s going to run properly, not the way it’s run rightnow.”The office of DC Mayor Muriel Bowser declined to comment.Young middle-aged Black man with trim hair and beard in blue suit and red tie.Trump has posited creating cities whole cloth as well, predicated on the idea that cities are uninspiring at best. Last year, he talked about building “cities” on federal lands, though this idea hasn’t entered into his speeches lately, which have taken a darker turn. At the time, he said there should be a contest to charter 10 cities using vacant, federally owned land. And he challenged local leaders to work with him to rid of “ugly buildings”, make cities and towns more liveable and build monuments to “our true American heroes”.“These cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination and give hundreds of of young people and other people, hardworking families, a shot at ownership and, in fact, the American Dream,” he said in one video.The Guardian guides you through the chaos of a hugely consequential presidential election. Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and of Service apply. Republicans, cheered on by Trump, have worked to make immigration a key issue in cities across the country by busing migrants from the US-Mexico border inland, to places run by Democrats like NewYork, DC and Chicago, overwhelming the social safety net in these cities. The idea of using federal funds granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency Fema to force immigration changes are included in a chapter about the Department of Homeland Security, written by Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of homeland security.The chapter’s initial recommendation is to dismantle DHS entirely, create a border-focused agency comprised of other immigration-related organizations and farm out the rest of its components to existing agencies or privatize them, in the case of the Transportation Security Administration. It’s not directly clear whether the aim is to use Fema funds including those that help cities and states in the immediate aftermath of an emergency like a tornado or flood – or large grant programs for things like emergency preparedness. One line in the chapter says “post-disaster or nonhumanitarian funding” could be exempt from the immigration policy requirements. The chapter also suggests that cities and states should take on more of the burden of financially responding to disasters. Fema administers most of the homeland security department’s grant programs to local governments, the project notes. The chapter suggests the many billions of in Fema grants outside of post-disaster relief have become an avenue for special interests and “pork” spending that “do not provide measurable gains for preparedness or resiliency”. The concept of withholding federal funding in this way is not for Trump. During his time in office, Trump tried to use the federal government’s funding strings to deprive US cities that didn’t abide by immigration policies of a justice department grant program, though the process got tied up in the courts for years. The Biden administration reversed the policy of using the Edward Byrne memorial justice assistance grants program, which sends about annually to local law enforcement, to compel immigration compliance. Trump also threatened in 2020 to withhold federal funds from cities he claimed had “allowed themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones” after that summer’s protests over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. In a memo, he specifically mentioned Portland, Seattle and NewYork City as places where chaos reigned, directing the federal government to review the use of federal funds to places that “permit anarchy, violence and destruction in America’s cities”. One of the conditions Project 2025 suggests is requiring states or localities to share information with the federal government for law and immigration enforcement, and specifies that this would include both department of motor vehicle and voter registration databases. This is of particular interest in many cities because 19 states and Washington DC allow undocumented people to drivers licenses, the Niskanen Center, a thinktank that delved into the project’s immigration aims, points out. These licenses help with public safety by decreasing the potential for hit-and-runs and increasing work hours, among other benefits, the center writes. If a city or state is forced to choose between issuing licenses and then sharing this information for use by immigration authorities, or accessing emergency funds for their whole population in a crisis, it’ll be tough for them to deny Fema said Cecilia Esterline, an immigration research analyst at the Niskanen Center. “I think that it is most likely that maybe the state will bend to the will of the executive on this. But that comes at a and that is not just a political one,” she said, though she noted that there will be pushback and likely lawsuits from states and cities if an incoming Trump administration tries to put these policies in place.