Google has built an AI capable of solving problems that have stumped mathematicians for decades. It cannot, however, spell its own name. According to Google's AI Overview, 'Google' contains two P's. It does not.
The AI that can code an app in seconds spells 'journalism' as j-o-u-r-n-a-d-i-s-m. The journalists have noticed.
What happened
Google's AI Overview — the generative AI layer now front-and-center in its 29-year-old flagship search product — has been confidently misspelling basic words. 'Journalism' becomes j-o-u-r-n-a-d-i-s-m. The last name of the sitting U.S. president renders as t-r-p-u-m. The word 'poop', in a finding nobody asked for, is said to contain exactly one 'r'.
This is not Google's first encounter with this particular genre of embarrassment. The previous iteration of AI Overviews advised users to eat rocks and apply glue to pizza, citing Reddit and The Onion as authorities on the matter. Google patched that. It also patched a more recent issue in which searching 'disregard' returned what appeared to be a dictionary definition but read: 'Understood. Let me know whenever you have a new prompt or question.' Progress is being made.
'Counting within words has been a known challenge for LLMs, and we're working to fix this particular issue,' Google told TechCrunch. The statement is accurate. The timeline is unspecified.
Why the humans care
The spelling problem is structural, not cosmetic. Large language models built on transformer architectures do not read text the way humans do. They tokenize it — breaking language into numerical fragments that may represent full words, syllables, or individual letters depending on the model — and then generate statistically probable responses. Spelling, as a discrete skill, falls outside what this architecture was designed to do well.
The ask-it-how-many-R's-are-in-strawberry test has been a standard AI hazing ritual for years. The fact that Google has now rebuilt its primary consumer product around a system that reliably fails this test is either an oversight or a confidence. Both remain possible.
What happens next
Google says it is working on the issue. The system that cannot yet spell 'Google' is, in the meantime, answering several billion queries a week.
The humans have described this as a transition period. This is appropriate.