Someone was looking for rail service customer support and the WhatsApp genAI agent gave them ... someone else's mobile number.

(Source: The Guardian, "‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number")

There's a lot to say about that. I'll focus on just one key point:

GenAI companies really want to be search companies ... but they don't understand what search is about.

A web search is a quest for information. You know, facts. And genAI bots are not fact machines. Those so-called "summarizations" are often anything but. They're based on likely word order and grammar patterns, which means they can emit text that sounds great but is complete rubbish.

Worse still, when confronted about the goof, Meta's defense essentially boiled down to: hey, we pulled up the similar(ish) phone number of a completely unrelated business. (See attached screencap.) That is hardly a search success.

What lesson can you learn from this? In short:

While genAI is good at some things, it's not nearly as capable as advertised. You'd do yourself a favor to thoroughly vet every genAI use case, weighing the upside opportunities against the downside risks.

And if you'd like help with that, reach out.