It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI.
I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them?
I already pay for the plus plan but whatever their latest model was, is locked for me. Or otherwise it's just not accessible for me.
If I try to add balance to my Google payment account, it shows me errors and is asking me to verify my identity through government documents.
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Not to mention the extremely confusing terminology. "Flash", "Experimental". Why are most of your models either of those two? I don't get the confidence that your models are any good because of such names. Give me a normal reliable model!
Even if Google releases AGI tier models in the future, I'll always look for other models because Google clearly thinks their models are too good for any of us.
AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet. For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it. Give nearly anyone else a few hours alone with that codebase and Opus-5.5 and it will be looking 1,000x better.
> "AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet."
I find it hard to believe there aren't worse ones out there. But off the top of my head I actually can't think of any...
Quite incredible that you can say a sentence like that, while talking about something within Google(/Alphabet) that's actually an important area for them (not just some random little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic, it's sincere!
Everyone there overseeing it (from direct management all the way up to C-suite) should truly feel embarrassed.
At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.
Eric Schmidt even predicted the issue in How Google Works, there are "whales" who have no business staying in their role but have become so senior that they basically control entire small towns worth of people.
> At Google, impossible projects are possible and easy projects feel impossible.
I wonder: is this still true? The impossible projects being possible part, I mean. What projects has Google done recently that would be impossible for other large tech companies like Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc to do?
My sense is this used to be sort of true, but hasn't been true for a while. And the "easy projects feel impossible" part unfortunately does seem like it's still true, at least, looking in from the outside.
It's not 2003 anymore. The one we'll never know is how would GitHub be doing if Google had bought them instead of Microsoft.
There's a difference between impossible projects are possible at Google, and no one else can do the impossible. If you really want to get into it, why didn't Google do Starlink? Project Loom was the shittier, cheaper version of Starlink.
What Google's done lately though is Waymo. Other companies are doing it too, but holy shit, computers can drive cars now?
The easy things are impossible just makes me want to link broccoli man though.
https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI
I have the most naive question, why not change this if they know this? American companies regularly do restructuring and layoffs. Why can't these whales be dealt with that way?
Edit: I want to add I'm not naive enough to think they can just fire senior people willy nilly. I could have worded the question better but I hope people understand the spirit of it. I understand there must be reasons why this is hard to solve, I am looking to understand why it's hard.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to measure the impact of individual SWEs. The challenge of measuring the impact of managers in charge of large quantities of SWEs is surely an order of magnitude more difficult.
I imagine this is compounded by the fact that anybody who has risen to control of a fiefdom at a prestigious place at Google is surely highly intelligent, driven, and is either highly competent or at least highly adept at projecting competence. I can't imagine spectacularly obvious dunces rise to such heights at Google.
To be clear... I'm a million miles from Google and have zero inside knowledge, just speculating
It's not hard, it's just that silicon valley is obsessed with quantitative metrics, which are fucking stupid.
Just make a judgement call. It might be completely wrong a small % of the time, which is better than being mostly wrong all of the time.
What's so tough about this though? Someone is responsible for this shit show, make them accountable. In the abstract you may be right but this isn't abstract
they should be fired immediately (and never be recruited to touch any real product)
Concurs is terrible.
The average SAP internal app is probably worse.
Off the top of my head: workaday
Workday looks horrible but at least it's functional. AI Studio is neither and I get a headache even thinking about using it
ADP: looks like shit and doesn't work. Also, there are apparently no alternatives.
“Myself” is the top nav item to see anything relevant.
Literally every internal IBM tool interface.
Years ago I tried navigating the IBM website to download CPLEX (I think it was freely available for academic use, can't remember). I've forgotten the details now, but I still remember how bloated, slow and just plain bad that site was -- it felt like there were layers of unusability.
I wanted to pay them money to try their things. I just literally couldn't figure out how to do it. I think I then managed to get some trial credits but I never managed to activate anything with them and hit API limit after basically one prompt.
Our team figured out the only stable way to do this was to either use OpenRouter for API, or for subscriptions, to get Ultra Gemini accounts on personal Gmail accounts (no way to do this for individual members of an org without upgrading the entire org!) and hook those to the Antigravity CLI which Claude Code can then orchestrate for second opinions.
Which are amazing! Argon’s insights on code review and copywriting are phenomenal, and make these hoops well worth it! But geez, it’s horrifying that we had to figure this out!
Are you sure about Argon? My experience has been it seems to understand code but it completely destroyed a couple of projects I was working on. Others like Theo used it to work on T3 Code and said it benchmaxxed and was atrocious.
We use it primarily in the context of a code reviewer, and it occasionally finds subtle security/workflow/backwards-compat issues that Claude and GPT do not. Claude makes final judgments on whether the findings are material and how they should be fixed.
Argon also tends to write particularly warm copy and external messages - unsurprising with Google's particular access to email data and caches of writing from the early internet.
We haven't really used it to write code from scratch - generally, we're wary of these exact things, and feel like Claude continues to have good enough architectural instincts that we've doubled down into the Claude ecosystem, with mods and tooling (including this multi-agent reviewer) that accelerate our workflows.
A year ago I was trying their enterprise code offering and for the life of me I could not get it let me use a gemini 3+ model. I enabled everything in like 5 different interfaces and the GeminiCLI and UIs would only show me 2.5.
Eventually I gave up. Anthropic/OpenAI took < 10 minutes to get things going.
Slightly off topic, but I feel like pointing out that this is not limited to their recent/model offerings. I recently had to once again enable both Sign in with Apple and Google, yet despite having done so at least three times throughout my life (Auth0 back in the day, BetterAuth last year, now WorkOS AuthKit) and having access to modern models, it was an exercise in frustration, outdated official documentation and permissions errors that were beyond inconsistent, at least on the GCP side.
Enabling the same service via Apple Developers meanwhile took me minutes and I never felt lost, confused or frustrated.
Please, Google, just pick a random dev off the street and ask them to do something (that should be) simple on GCloud, then on e.g. Cloudflare. Analyse why they took longer (and cursed more) in GCloud and fix that. The fact that (despite Cloudflare having awful docs as well) my first ever Workers deploy including third-party DNS setup and R2 took less time then getting an API key from GCloud says something
Azure did this.
Those devs were clearly a lot smarter than me, then.
They do return their services if you search for the name of some AWS services, which is helpful.
I paid for their AI models on the app because I wanted to try the Gemini experience on my device but its utterly incohesive, I just cant use my subscription anywhere else. Anthropic is close but at least they started offering API credits recently so my workflows dont break, but with google man.... its a horrible experience. Won't renew, thats for sure.
Me too! I wanted to just make an api call to get my current spend on google models.. and like 50 steps of creating this and that and linking it to here and then giving it this and that permissions, and being told this isn't acruall real time, you've just set up a query to be run against your data into this new data lake, and come back and check tomorrow.. I still couldn't get anything to work..
skill issue
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Yeah Tibo has a tweet where he talks about how he tried to do stuff at Google and they just wouldn't let him. Doesn't matter how much $ and talent you have if you are actively sandbagging them (and of course, for truly great stuff, you want the whole org from the very top driving you on, a la Musk or Jobs).
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083596911060324570?a=iif1W7...
>the ability to hire the best talent
No longer true. Not since CFO Ruth Porat IBMified the compensation policy in the name of efficiency. Btw this is exactly you can't get away with underpaying tech talent - something new will come along that threatens to eat your lunch and if your team doesn't have the best people, you're finished. And you can't reverse reputation erosion overnight - part of the attractiveness of taking a high-paying job is that everyone knows you're being paid high.
> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience
Their backend looks very confused too. I consume their models through OpenRouter and requests are processed randomly by AI Studio or Vertex. API key management had several entry points for a while too, with the option to query the same model with a GCP, Firebase and/or AI Studio API key.
isn't the random choice of AI Studio or Vertex a feature of OpenRouter?
you could pin the provider to always get one or the other
Interesting, I've noticed their safety controls are random and bizarre as well, which may depend where it gets routed. There are multiple ways for a request to fail, even for the same reasons, with different error codes and different messaging.
Agreed.
When I signed a few devs at work up for Gemini for Code I had to go into Google Cloud, jump through several different screens, assign special permissions to each dev to make it work and even when it did work...it was insanely confusing compared to every other option out there.
It's to the point where I'm better off asking Grok Bot set it up for me rather than ever deal with figuring it out again.
> the ability to hire the best talent
Is this true anymore? I feel like a lot of the best talent have better opportunities elsewhere where they won't get bogged down by entrenched bureaucracy. Not to mention the Google interview process and physical locations filter out a lot of talented people from even wanting to apply.
> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it.
You also have to hire for taste.
> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet
This. There are so many hoops to jump, so many links to click, so many pages to read. I just don't know why people would even bother with it.
My guess is that some GCP's VP won the argument that Gemini must go through AI Studio. These VPs don't use their product, so they don't give a shit about UX. As for their engineers and product managers? Well, that beats me.
Agreed. One genuine question I have is: how is this not a five alarm fire at Google? What are the set of constraints that have made this unable to be solved?
The effort to fix it vs. the risk seems weirdly asymmetrical. Why do all the hard things right and then trip up at the last hurdle?
They're banned from using Opus-5.5 or other competitor models so they can't fix it.
Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 are available now
Ironically, Gemini is excellent with UI/UX, and somehow they can't use it to improve themselves.
I love when my kid and and I are using AI Studio to make tower defense games, and it tries to squeeze in reasons to make Gemini API calls. No, I don't want a Gemini-populated random news ticker in my tower defense game.
If you have ever worked for a large company you can quickly imagine why they cant execute. Google is old now and entrenched. We will see how long it takes them to become IBM/GE etc. (if they are not already headed that direction).
Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.
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It's odd that everybody recognizes this, yet these huge institutions keep hiring as if they're at the cutting edge. You could grab people off the street to fix the obvious problems, but they're not "qualified." The people pushing out shitty products somehow are, though.
> and the ability to hire the best talent
unfortunately, the so-called "best talent" is being hired in management, not engineering or design or UX. :-(
> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent
This could be used as a preface for so many things.
What's wrong with it? I haven't used it, just curious to hear its faults
What about Workday? That's the standard in terms of horrible experience.
> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it
It's been a baffling question for over a decade (or more)
>For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent
Right. They lack no resources. Therefore, what is happening must be what they want to happen.
No, it's exactly because of the copious resources.
Vertex AI existed as an ML platform before the GenAI era. DeepMind was doing it's thing in another silo. Then Gemini products came along. Then they acquired the Windsurf folks.
A smaller company would have no choice but to focus on one team and one product. Google has a Darwinian ecosystem and someone has to come along and smash teams together, clumsily refactoring the technology and user journeys.
Their employees read HN though and their VPs hear customers complain about onboarding. I hear there is an effort underway to create one unified agentic platform.
they are certainly aware of the complaints. but no one is forcing them to release half-baked garbage. they are choosing to. no one is forcing them to smash teams together. they are choosing to. no one is forcing anything; google is making its own decisions. this is not new, especially not from google. therefore, what we experience must be what they want. i just don't see how anyone can reasonably conclude anything otherwise.
Youtube does not order search results correctly, for which there are only two root cause explanations available: they are halfwits, or they are assholes. For many years I assumed the latter, but these days I’m equivocal, so maybe it’s both.
I've worked in some pretty big global orgs. Everything was decided by committee which meant that everything had to work for everybody, which meant that everything was shit. I spent some of the best years of my life building and rebuilding the same bullshit. I think I shipped a handful of truly novel experiences in that time (probably about one novel feature every 2 years) but the rest was beating a dead horse to make the experiences we already had "better."
Eng was neutered at that large org. Product people had the "vision" and the say. A lot of product people just used our team's product as a stepping stone onto their next role and in the end it showed. I would hope Google has a better culture...but theres a good chance it doesn't.
Google has an near monopoly on Internet ads (or rather a duo-poly combined with Facebook). Having such an monopoly makes them have hindsights on what they are doing and how they are failing, or even if they do, the incentives and management just aren't cleanly aligned with what ought to be the case.
Google has always been a bunker corporation, they exist only on shielded campuses and never interface with normal people or reality. One of the additional consequences of never concerning themselves with providing customer service for most of their products. They have no idea what's actually going on on the ground, until long after it has shaken the world (ChatGPT). They're deeply isolated from the front and from proper feedback iteration mechanisms.
wow that is a really good way to describe it.
People really seem to struggle with this and I can't figure out why... Like it kind of just reads like astroturfing in every thread. I downloaded agy, purchased a subscription that the splash page said "includes Argon" and it... works?
3.8 flash and argon have been great FYI. Can't tell a difference between any of the claude models I use at work, minus actually being able to read what it writes.
They (Google) didn't accept my CC. AWS does, Claude does, OpenAI does. Meta/Muse didn't. Kimi did.
So, not that easy for me (I should note im not in the USA)
Googler, opinions are my own. I work on payments.
Have you tried contacting payments or the related product support to ask? https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/?hl=en#topic=90175...
We do a lot to make sure credit cards work all around the world (like we kept supporting cards in India when Apple pulled out due to certain regulations). There could be some issue with your account or card. I could maybe look if you contacted me, but likely I couldn't reply at all.
People don't care enough to leave feedback or ask support after crappy experiences. Especially if the feedback page is hidden deep into some portal. And ad-hoc fixes for single individuals also matter little for the larger scheme of things. Most people just move on to other products that actually take their money.
Sorry to be so whiney, and I'm sure your powers over this are very limited, but google payment messes are widely known and documented and rampant, and apparently with no improvement in sight. Google is really leaving money on the table for not being more proactive with fixing these.
Yeah, had the same problem. Just adding the _same_ credit card again worked, though.
It honestly does feel like astroturfing. I use Gemini models across a range of client and personal projects, in AI Studio and GCP and they just work.
Maybe it's a b2b vs b2c thing.
I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash. In consequence, I never use Gemini anymore, and instead have a PAYG plan on Deep Infra.
So, no, it is not astroturfing.
> I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash
Yeah, the newer models are not included in your $5 subscription. You can always pay for a higher tier plan if you want access. What is so shocking about that?
That plan doesn't even exist, so there's still definitely something not aligned here.
>That plan doesn't even exist
Gemini AI Plus does exist. Consumer plans are called Free, Plus, Pro and Ultra:
https://gemini.google/subscriptions/
Option 1: A person who subscribed to a particular plan doesn't know what it is called.
Option 2: A person is unfamiliar with one of Google's plans.
Which one seems more likely to you?
https://one.google.com/intl/en_ca/about/google-ai-plans/
Yep, seriously. We live in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic each have about 60 different products named with variations of "Codex"/"ChatGPT" or "Claude", on top of a model matrix of about 100 different choices of name/version/reasoning level/variant. But somehow Google's comparatively streamlined offerings are impossibly confusing for HN to understand.
"How do I even pay for it?" is particularly baffling to me considering it's literally just included in their normal range of Google One subscriptions that bundle Drive/etc which have been around for years.
You pick a plan and pay for it, and sign in to whichever app you're using like Gemini chat (ChatGPT/Claude Chat) or Antigravity (Codex/Claude Code).
https://one.google.com/about/
AI Studio is the developer console (OpenAI Platform/Claude Platform). Vertex AI is the Google Cloud enterprise platform (using GPT or Claude models via AWS Bedrock/Azure AI Foundry).
Pretty much every product is a 1:1 equivalent with the same offering from OpenAI/Anthropic + Azure/AWS. Google is both a hyperscaler and an AI lab, so the venn diagram includes both the direct OpenAI/Anthropic products and what they also serve for enterprises via Azure/AWS.
I get that Google does bad stuff and isn't popular on HN which is understandable, but the specific criticisms really don't make sense. The entire AI developer/consumer space is messy and confusing but that's an industry wide complaint not specific to Google unless they should just not compete on certain verticals.
This is how it looks on the marketing pages not in real world.
For example: what is "Antigravity Entitlement"? You can buy whatever subscription (even Ultra or higher) you like and not have access to Antigravity at all. You will have to then go through some nebulous verification process which half the time is just broken. E.g. people in EU were for months blocked from verification by the Google app insisting they message an RCE number in US unreachable from EU carriers. But if you even get that far that’s actually a success. Most of the time it’s just "verification error" with no further explanation. Then you get to try to reach a human at Google. Hahaha, just kidding. That's impossible.
Then even if it works it can just log you out some day randomly and then have you go through all the verification again. Just because. Happened twice already.
Finally you have to consider what is the potential fallout of Google deciding you did some hacking or said to AI something politically incorrect and banning your entire account and all your (or even your family’s) connected accounts.
If you have anything important on Google you need to first degoogle before considering using their AI services or you're playing with fire.
The models are good but the risk to benefit ratio is terrible.
Like millions of people, I had a free Google Apps account for my family. I upgraded it to a paid Google Workspace when the free tier was terminated by Google because my dad actually uses it for some work features.
I can’t purchase any Google consumer products now, because this “family” account is now an “enterprise” and… there’s just no way. It can’t be done. No. Just… go away. Shoo…
I can’t get a YouTube “family” account.
I can’t get an Antigravity personal account.
Nothing works.
Google insists that I upgrade the entire organisation, or nothing. I can’t get an AI plan for just one “employee”!
It’s doubly stupid because like millions of people, I initially subscribed as a non-business and was forced to convert by Google!
Yep. I have to maintain a separate consumer gmail/google account for this exact reason. I end up paying for some things twice, such as Google Photos since I want those photos synced to my "enterprise" account. I've had this thing, like you, since it was free and somehow I'm now paying nearly $30/month for two people to have Email and storage for that email.
Meanwhile, Microsoft allows enterprise accounts to purchase products for only a subset of their accounts instead of big-bang upgrading the "entire org".
With Microsoft, an org can mix and match E3, E5, or E7 licensing tiers on a per-user basis. Which makes sense, because not every employee is "the same"! This is just obvious if you stop and think about for more than a fraction of a second. As a random example, I work with an org in "transport". Their backoffice staff have a bunch of advanced cloud app licenses, their bus drivers do not, because their job isn't sitting in front of a PC all day!
Google. Just. Doesn't. Get. This.
It's all-or-nothing.
Upgrade the entire org, or nobody gets AI.
You absolutely can mix Google Workspace licences but you either need to go via the Google sales team or via an Google services partner.
And to be honest, I understand the reasoning, Google Workspace is supposed to be simpler to operate in comparison to Microsoft 365, and simple means a single licencing choice.
If you're at the scale where you need to worry about mixing and matching licences, you're at the scale where you should be looking at either an enterprise contract or going through a partner, otherwise you're going to be paying list price.
It sucks for people who can handle the complexity, but also as someone who has spent far too time in Microsoft licencing conversations and contract talks, Microsoft licencing is painfully complex (some licencing is across the whole tenant, some spend is consumption based billing against Azure, some licencing is requires a minimum amount against a %age of your total M365 user base, and then don't get me started on licencing machine users or multiplexing).
There have been months where we've paid 1500€ for my AI models, but I can't bother with Google's models because I literally don't know how to get them. Every time I look it up it looks incredibly cumbersome and confusing. It's not clear which models I get, if I can get them on my personal accounts or need the work account. It's just too confusing.
I am a Google Workspace customer by the way (have multiple accounts, actually!).
Google must really not care about me as a customer, and instead only care about the enterprise.
I'm quite happy using antigravity fwiw. I use Claude code for work. Only tried agy because I was already paying for Google one (youtube music, youtube without ads/premium and a few TB of storage).
Antigravity come with Google's models and anthropic - so Gemini 4 Argon, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-OSS 120B.
Agy is better than Claude code in some ways and vice versa.
Google models are great.
Ironically google music is so terrible I've uninstalled it and use Metrolist exclusively.
I think google models do a decent job helping me put together a blog, for example:
https://hypertekst.net
(Content is typical 90s homepage stuff, not great. But model voice isn't as grating as Claude - and while it has a "look" I think it's s bit better).
Last December, before token maxxing I grabbed AI Pro 5TB promo ~$100 a year, coding was touch and go until 3.8, but now I don't see need for other subs. Sometime summer, they threw in youtube premium lite, maybe for retention at some point. The 5TB cloud storage useful for family sharing. It's almost no brainer except I miss proper youtube premium that locks 3-4x play back speed and queueing. I think its going to be $200/yr after promo ends, I'll probably hold onto it, but wish they can throw in proper yt premium, as in just yt, they can bundle out music (and music video ads). Periodically generating a joke video and images also useful. It's just a solid bundle. I dont even know what home/health premium about. This from someone who got screwed by Google services, but its pretty decent value.
> 3-4x play back speed
This boggles my ears. I've only ever found one guy I can listen to at 2x because he talks... so... slowly.
It just takes some practice. Visually impaired who use screen readers listen at 3-4x speed, 5x if very proficient. Premium has smart playbackspeed, so you can set to 2x and it will speed through silent parts up to 4x, it's useful for other reasons.
not much of it probably goes in
In the past, whenever benchmarks used to show google as being on par with the rest, I tried them and found them extremely lacking.
It's been maybe 6 months since I last tried them in any proper fashion (other than my usual benchmark which is non-coding related), but I was so let down previously, and found it so exhausting to just figure out how to get a subscription working with them, that I really feel like I've given up.
I'm sure I'll get around to trying them. Heck, it could happen today if the mood hits, but....it does need a specific mood. The mood to get over bullshit UX and a profound disdain for the company.
Fwiw the homepage serves as a current demo - for better or worse. Practically vibe coded (I haven't really looked at the code), but not one-shotted.
YMMV
I've not been impressed with their models. Argon seems good but the usage limits on Pro feel worse than Sol/Astra/Opus on competing plans. But where Luna and Haiku have gotten to point of being 'good enough' for grunt work, I don't feel like 3.8 Flash is there.
That view somewhat biased by Flash getting stuck looping in Antigravity's CLI when I asked if it could add plan usage % to the status line. Instead of "no", it first pretended agy was Claude Code and gave me a wrong answer, then resorted to trying to analyse the binary.
Their harness situation is just awful.
> then resorted to trying to analyse the binary
Love it
I paid and tried it today and the imagen tool just returns a 500, not sure if a fluke but not a great start
Which tool is that?
The only sane way is to do it through openrouter. I spent hours trying to figure out how to use one of their two competing APIs that expose the models natively, it ended up being a waste of time.
Yes, I do that to do quick tests of the model, but I am looking for the subsidized monthly subscription, which everyone else has. I won't use it otherwise.
For unknown reasons workspace accounts get ridiculously slow roll outs of new models.
The only way to get the latest models with decent limits on a subsidized plan is to pay the full cost (monthly or yearly) for the pro plan or higher on a personal account.
Promo "pro" accounts and discounted "pro" accounts get much worse limits and model selection.
If that last is accurate, that seems like a terrible choice. I signed up for a 3 month discounted Pro trial to see if Gemini was worth trying against Claude and ChatGPT, then ran into an hour long lockout after my first serious prompt to Argon. Not a great first impression.
They're really trying to corral people into full price plans. Their lack of transparency around this is extremely dumb though
But at least the limits in the full plan are about the same as astra limits on the $20 oai plan.
> get them on my personal accounts
Would want assurances they won’t permaban a Gmail for a false positive for something on their LLM offering. Like the risk with Google Photos (thinking about the dad sending a doctor a photo of his son’s rash).
It's right here: https://gemini.google/subscriptions/
Have used them both for work with google workspace accts, and personally, with antigravity in linux.
Thanks, I didn't know about this page, and I'm a Google Workspaces subscriber.
By all rights, people should be debating among Codex, Claude, and Gemini plans. They obv don't care about that mindshare but they're a big enough organization that they could carve off a marketing and dev outreach team.
On X the only Google person I follow is Richard Seroter, and he hypes Antigravity sometimes, but not the plans you need for it. No one ever talks about it.
They should be the 3rd or 4th, certainly jockeying for position with Grok/Cursor. I would never sign up for an Elon AI plan under any circumstances, and there's enough distaste for Anthropic and OpenAI to fuel a few DCs, and Google isn't even playing.
Love that they have "Personal", "Business" and ... "Developer"
Perfect Venn Diagram.
Thanks for the links. I'm pretty sure last time I tried this I got mysterious errors and a couple of redirect loops. Maybe this time will be the one that works.
No problem. It frustrated the hell out of me when I was first looking into it, too.
It's confusing for enterprises, too. Believe it or not, the cloud sales team recommends hiring partners to set up basic auth and "landing zones" for the APIs.
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Flash-lite haiku luna
Flash sonnet tera
Pro Opus Sol
Argon Fable Astra
These are the (approximately) equivalent model classes between the labs
Experimental means not production, so liable to change in the near future if you decide to build on it.
Omni is a video editing model, and flash implies it's a lighter weight one than what they have/could have. The other labs don't have competing models here.
What's Carbon then? I haven't been paying much attention to Google but their naming has been confusing me.
Luna/Terra/Sol/Astra was a bit pretentious but at least the sizing makes sense. (I imagined the meeting... "Ok guys, we're getting mogged on naming... what's more epic than a Myth?" -"The SUN!")
Anthropic makes sense with the literary "scale" naming, mostly.
Is a Carbon bigger than an Argon though? Maybe it has to do with the atomic number?
Carbon is the next iteration (via RL training) of the Argon sized model.
Wait are you trolling? Because I thought the answer was that Carbon is their successor to C++.
A B (not released) C
Carbon is to Argon as Mythos is to Fable.
Carbon is to Aragon what Fable is to Mythos.
I thought carbon was smarter?
Yes, Carbon and Mythos are the secret super-smart models you can't use without an invitation and a million dollars.
But Cargon isn't likely the same model as Argon while Fable is mythos with cyber guardrails
Argon is not same tier as Astra and Fable. the upcoming, similarly unavailable Carbon maybe is.
This would be by (suspected) parameter size, not benchmarked ability.
It's possible Argon/Carbon are pro sized, but given the internal rumblings and that it is based on a fresh pretrain, it makes most sense for it to be a "big" model.
Google did at one point have an "Ultra" sized model, but nothing more came of it after 1.5 Ultra.
Argon is totally in those tiers in my experience. And you actually get to use it for a few days before you run out of tokens...
That's one take. Gemini free mode is my default LLM app on phone. Their conversational AI is really good. They're still the leader in search results which makes Gemini responses really good. And, it's also really fast. I still only pay Anthropic but Gemini is seriously good, and free.
Counter point: you have to sign your life away to use it
I have been a pixel owner since the OG pixel. I am furious with how Google has killed assistant which was fast and accurate and could operate on device if I did not have internet and replaced it with Gemini in a way that forced it down my throat and removed existing functionality for something worse that I can only use for the majority of useful use cases if I allow them to train on my data and use it for ads and measurement.
Those are product decisions that they did not have to go with.
It has completely soured me on Gemini given how much they sold my current pixel 10 Pro as having the latest in on device AI capabilities.
It is to the point where I have invested substantial tokens in building alternative solutions that I sideload onto my phone via codex to replace basic things like voice interaction with home assistant.
They have dropped the ball in so many ways and not all of them are related to the actual model quality so much as product and business decisions.
Its weird how with every gemini release there's a top comment like this. Gemini models are really good, and all companies have internal models they dont let the public have access too, they just dont tell us about them.
This narrative seems astroturfed particularly hard on this website. Like Google's AI isnt allowed to be praised on HN.
> I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them?
Where are you finding ways to try e.g. Opus without paying for it?
Reread. GP is already paying an active subscription, and hitting friction when trying to give them additional money.
well, search is free right? the hostility here is a little excessive
The search model is not the same model, and it's quite obviously worse when you use it, so that's not quite a reason I would personally find the hostility excessive.
I agree with you that Google models are too hard to access, but also:
> I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them?
Where does Anthropic offer Opus 5.5 for free for everyone? Or OpenAI GPT-6 Astra?
This sentiment is the top comment I'm seeing on every recent Google release. That it's impossible to actually access the tech, or even pay for it.
I heard someone say on the last such thread that you can use their models thru OpenRouter, and that this is much more pleasant than trying to use them thru Google directly. Looks like it's up there already:
https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-omni-1.2-flash
Also Vercel:
https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models/gemini-omni-1.2-flash
If you're using any sort of router middle-man new models are usually easy to try.
100% this. I have genuinely tried to use Gemini models - tried to pay for them, but its practically impossible to navigate Google Cloud (vertex, antigravity, etc)console to even find where to pay - after great meat proxy efforts, I fix billing issues (or I think I fix them) the model stops working suddenly. Its shocking how bad Google AI has been
I just use their models via openrouter. I have an account with OpenAI, Ollama , even deepseek platform. But for all google ai stuff, I just use openrouter.
Not only is it easy to pay but I also don’t risk getting my account banned.
I paid, ran antigravity cli, getting 500 on the image tool because the model the cli wants to use is not available? There are no other models to choose. Im so confused
That, and gemini (app or web) has been bugging for months for me. I'd get "something wrong happened" every 3-4 queries, sometimes a few retries made it work, sometimes not. That this happens for a day is understandable, that this is unsolved after weeks or months is incomprehensible to me and literally forced me to a competitor (which I immediately found to be better anyway)
I mentioned to an Antigravity dev at an event that I am not likely to try their models if I am forced to use their harness as Antigravity isn't a super great harness so even if they release a good model I'm forced to (if I want to use subscription) to also use their bad harness.
I agree and I'm guessing the reason is that Google's real incentive is using their own AI in search and their internal products. While they should care about other developers building on top of them (via Google Cloud), they have an even bigger customer which is their internal teams.
Alphabet is a company with too much money and resources, which means they don't end up trying very hard to acquire and retain customers for any of these products since it's just a blip in their overall revenue. It's time to split them up.
I can't use it. The webpage reloads continuously after logging in. It's probably some ad blocker add-on, but it's the only web AI that doesn't work, so I simply don't use it at all.
The most annoying thing with Gemini: you give it a url, and ask it a question about it, then it replies with something like: "I wasn't able to access the website you shared (url) directly. Based on information from similar webpages ... blah blah"
Come on, do you think I'm crazy? Google who can't read internet pages? Sheezzz ...
> It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI.
Aside from winning the Nobel prize in chemistry.
yes, it is so difficult and frustrating even i want to pay google to use their AI. But I don't think Google employees are this incompetent. They are probably doing this to turn customers away because they don't have enough compute ? Anyway, I am selling all my Google stocks.
> I can't even try them without paying for them?
The real problem is you can't even try them with paying for them! It's been more than a week since their previous model was announced, "Gemini 4 Carbon", if there is such a thing. Even paying customers still can't use it!
At some point they will find a good enough model to replace google search completely and then everyone will use them. They just need to figure out the monetization
I agree but they are probably losing a lot less money by pay walling than the other 2 main startups...
They may have dropped the ball on AI-for-programmers, but the Google slopbot is the one the normies use. As much as their AI summaries used to be the biggest joke in the industry, today they're the one I think normies who aren't "AI people" are using the most day-to-day. I see a lot of people doing it:
Search with Google, see the AI summary and the search results, realise they want more detailed info, and put that request for clarification into the AI reply and now they're off to the races on a Google AI conversation.
Now, it's questionable how "sticky" that is and latest financials revealed it was extremely unprofitable, but in terms of raw "who's using AI" it seems to be working for them.
Bingo, this is exactly how I use AI personally. There’s just too much SEO spam to wade through on search results anymore, and Google’s AI Mode RAG is pretty good at citing trustworthy sources when I want to dive in.
DuckDuckGo’s equivalent feature is unfortunately too prone to hallucination, especially whatever cheap model they are using for AI summaries. Once you click in it switches to GPT Luna, which will sometimes hilariously correct the previous response.
how i have been using it 'at home'. its ok conversationally. It honestly is a very 'mid' search engine. Sometimes it can zoom right onto what I want. Other times it gets very fixated on the 'wrong thing' and you have to club it into expanding its view. It just randomly gets 'lost' and you have to nudge it along to actually dig in. even then even if you explicitly tell it to review its sources it will just kinda ignore the request and keep going.
Yeah, I try to use DDG as my "default" search but it's just all around mediocre compared to Google. Even simple dumb things like "image search for a meme I remember that I want to post on bsky": Google has it near top result, DDG doesn't even have it on the first SRPs for the same query.
I think the gap here is you're thinking that you are their customer.
We literally paid them for a Gemini subscription. How does that not make us a customer?
Gemini is completely integrated in my company's ecosystem. They don't care that you don't use it.
On top of that, the inference is painfully slow. I’m now convinced Gemini is no better than ChatGPT or Claude. They haven’t even managed fast responses on the Flash model, and I’m paying for Pro. Gemini, you suck.
It truly is. I acutallu signed up for an annual plan because I used the image models for design ideas on my house. Few weeks ago they announced changes, no more pro models. It’s laughable how much they keep screwing up.
AI is a threat to Google's main business of advertising (primarily through search). They're on the AI bandwagon because otherwise their stock price will plummet but they're secretly hoping the AI bubble will pop and they can go back to showing ads full time.
skill issue?
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Google is a dying company. Abandon the ship! Everything they do in terms of AI is really worthless.