Google is expanding AI Overviews, the feature that summarizes answers to complex questions from the web and presents them at the top of traditional search results, to six more countries -- India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and the United Kingdom -- from Thursday with support for local languages as well as English. That's less than three months after AI Overviews launched in the United States and promptly told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas. Bringing them to millions more people begs the question: How do you prevent another glue pizza fiasco in a foreign country? "It's a challenging space," Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for Search at Google, told Engadget in an interview. "Understanding quality at the scale of the web across all these languages is a hard problem, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy to do. Using AI to better understand languages is pretty critical."

A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google's aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI--and also the treacherous and fundamental limitations of that technology. Google's AI Overviews feature draws on Gemini, a large language model like the one behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, to generate written answers to some search queries by summarizing information found online. The current AI boom is built around LLMs' impressive fluency with text, but the software can also use that facility to put a convincing gloss on untruths or errors. Using the technology to summarize online information promises can make search results easier to digest, but it is hazardous when online sources are contractionary or when people may use the information to make important decisions.