The Internet being mostly broken at this point is driving me a little insane, and I can’t believe that people who have the power to keep a functioning search engine for themselves wouldn’t go ahead and do it.
I wonder about this every time I see people(?) crowing about how amazing AI is. Like, is there some secret useful AI out there that plebs like me don’t get to use? Because otherwise, huh?
The LLM? Yes, actually, and it’s not secret:
https://aistudio.google.com/
The “preview” version are often pretty good, before Google deep fries them with sycophantic RHLF. For example, Gemini 2.0 and 2.5 Pro both peaked in temporary experimental versions, before getting worse (and benchmark maxxed) in subsequent updates.
But if you really want unenshittified LLMs, look into open weights models like GLM. They’re useful tools, and locally runnable. They are kind of a “secret useful AI out there that plebs don’t get to use” because of the software finickiness and hardware requirements to run it locally make it difficult.
On top of that, Google employees probably have access to “teacher” models and such that the public never gets to see.
For search? IDK. I’m less familiar on what Google does internally, but honestly, from what I’ve read, the higher ups are drinking kool-aid and assert all is fine.