The google AI clippy thing at the top of search has to be one of the most pointless, ill-advised and brand-damaging stunts they could have done. Because compute is expensive at scale (even for them) it’s running a small model, so the suggestions are pretty terrible. That leads people to who don’t understand what’s happening to think their AI is just bad in general.

That’s not the case in my experience. Gemini is almost as good as Claude for most of the things I try.

That said, for queries tgat don’t use agentic search or rag, hallucination is as bad a problem as ever and it won’t improve because hallucination is all these models do. In Karpathy’s phrase they “dream text”. Agentic search and rag and similar techniques disguise the issue because they stuff the context of the model with real results, so the scope for it to go noticeably off the rails is less. But it’s still very visible if you ask for references, links etc many/most/sometimes all will be hallucinations depending on the prompt.