Google's AI Overview keeps making spelling mistakes, showing a big weakness of large language models

Google's AI Overview, a new search feature, is making lots of basic spelling mistakes. For example, it said the word 'Google' has two letter P's, spelled 'journalism' as 'j-o-u-r-n-a-d-i-s-m', and even wrote the US president's last name as 't-r-p-u-m'. Earlier, it also gave weird advice like 'eat rocks' based on joke posts.

Google said in a statement that large language models have trouble counting letters in words and they're working on fixing this. Researchers explain that these models use a system called Transformer, which breaks text into pieces called 'tokens' instead of letters. So they can't really 'read' spelling the way humans do. For instance, a model might see 'the' as one code, not three separate letters.

Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher at the University of Alberta, said these models don't actually read text but turn it into numbers. Sheridan Feucht, a PhD student at Northeastern University, added that there's no perfect way to split words into tokens, so spelling problems are hard to completely fix. These mistakes remind us not to blindly trust AI results and always double-check them.