It would be incredibly helpful to me if AI model names followed cars.
I'm not scratching my head about a "2025 Corolla." Windows 95 and 2000 had this built in, but then they lost it.
I'd prefer it was called Omni 2026.2 instead. It embeds a date and model and would package it as a product for on-premise or local hosting. It'd be easier to sell to the bean counters in the future: "We're running Omni 2026.2, we want to upgrade to Omni 2028."
They aren't far from cars. Cars have generations and each generation has distinct models, for market (region), body style, maybe generational steps with facelift, etc. So your "2005 Corolla" is Corolla Gen9 (2000-2007), designated E120/E130 (no idea how they differ), and can be 3-door/5-door hatchbacks, 4-door sedan, station wagon, varying which market you look at.
it’s a shame that Google/Gemini decided to restrict and fuck other adventurous yet extremely gracious paying customers; who were excited at the prospect of not being locked in to two obnoxious companies.
oh well, I guess we’ll just have to take that enthusiasm and roll it over to all the open weights on providers like fireworks.ai. or others.
i’m so happy I got in early and paid for $200 a month for shit ass Opus 4.6 and sonnet 4.6 and being locked into the absolutely limited Gemini 3.8 flash.
When playback ends on one of the videos, the page jumps back to that video for some reason. I saw this too when I had multiple videos playing at once and the earlier clip on the page finished while watching another one lower on the page.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> "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 little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic it's sincere. Anyone there overseeing it should truly feel embarrassed.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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 a 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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Google does tend to have terrible messaging/branding/etc that results in part of these problems.
When Argon first came out, it wasn't included in Antigravity/agy and I personally never saw a Google stated plan on when they would include it, and because they removed Gemini Pro when Argon was released there was a brief window where Antigravity/agy didn't support a "Pro" model at all even for people with a "Pro" subscription.
That said, I'm with you on the idea that Google is roughly on par with everyone else despite the rhetoric here on HN that makes it look like they are way behind. They do have typical Google problems with messaging/branding for their AI products, just like all their other products, but when I use Google models for personal use I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything I get when using Anthropic for work stuff (paid for by the company).
And for context I say this all as someone who is a bit of a Google hater these days (not happy with some recent Android decisions, moved off of gmail to avoid too much Google power concentration, etc).
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).
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.
Like millions of people, I had a free Google Apps account for my family. I upgraded it to a paid Google Workspace 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 be the entire organisation, or nothing.
It’s doubly stupid because like millions of people, I initial 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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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!
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
The rollout is so confusing. Going straight to the Gemini app and asking when I can use this model gets me vague and contradicting answers. Ultimately it sounds like the Vids rollout will take 1-3 days, and you can go to vids.new on desktop to see if you’ve won the lottery and have it available now, apparently on any free Google account. Business accounts can use it too. Meanwhile the Gemini app is getting it on paid plans, but with different video length limits and no clear rollout timeline. If you pay for the API, it’s available now apparently.
TFA is literally a marketing piece for why someone might want to use it. If you personally don't need it, that's ok, you're just not their target audience.
> Today, we’re rolling out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, and making it generally available across the Gemini API and Gemini for business. Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash introduces native 15-second video creation, multi-turn conversational editing capabilities, and enhanced reference following. We have dropped the price 30% from Gemini Omni 1.1 making it available at $0.07 per second for 720p video.
Completely random, but I was inspecting the source code for their Omni 1.2 Flash web page, and there are insane amount of newlines. There are seven newlines between the first line and the DOCTYPE. There are huge amount of newlines between each section. What did they use to generate this website?
they might have a composer layer which loads certain components (transparent to you) with and without authentication and mixing different backend sources.
Then they might have templating engines and frameworks.
Sometimes they just don't care but lets be honest: a few new lines are a few bytes.
But the most critical pages go through optimizers for traffic
Enterprise websites tend to have very complicated content generation systems with little care about performance (including html/css/js size). What's hypocritical is that Google penalizes in SERP sites which have poor performance score yet Google's own sites are far from exemplary.
Hot take, Google should focus on their open weight models. I use Qwen 3.8 and it’s been amazing. I would pay for Max but there’s no provider or server here in the states. If they had an amazing Gemma 5, I would seriously consider trying their closed source models. Model comfort and familiarity is a real thing.
Not going to even read this post. While I have been really bullish on Google I am now tired of them constantly baiting us with vaporware announcements unfortunately.
The average length of a shot in full length feature film today is like three seconds. Even back in the old days, the average shot was like 12 seconds. Most movies are made up sequences and scenes made up of lots and lots of shots.
Increasing the available range of shot lengths from 10 seconds to 15 seconds gives film makers a wider pallet of options, if the longer shots have continuity, which is the other claim here.
I'm not aware of any "one-shot", one and done, use cases that are much more compelling the clip is 15s vs 10s. But that's not relevant to many people actually using AI video models like this on a daily basis.
Plenty of things. I am using it to create a dataset of fatigued drivers for the company I work. It keeps the starting frame / angle really well and is the best I tried so far. We are building a fatigue detection model for safety.
What's this new stupid name and versioning now, NOBODY understands Google's Ai products, including subscribers to them.
My friend on Google ai plus is still stuck on gemini 3.6 flash and now they're taking away 3.1 pro from them too even though it's long obsolete, like zero regard for user interactions here
honestly the naming on all of them from all companies is weird unless you 'know where to look'. I get having a cool code name for each one. But give me a clear way to look at it and see why should I use one model over another? like 'low/medium/high' something?! please!
Yeah, it would be nice if there was some standardized naming. You'd think these AI companies would benefit if users actually knew which models were the fast ones and which models were the more capable ones. It's easy for the layman to get bad output and come to the wrong conclusion, writing off an entire brand.
Maybe it's because I'm more in the Anthropic ecosystem, but I find their naming convention pretty straight forward. I've given up trying to follow OpenAI, but they have a version number that goes up and sometimes they call one of them "cyber" so you know it's I guess extra good at red teaming?
Google is just beyond me I have no idea what they're doing, and no interest in figuring it out. I use a free gemini flash model in one of my personal apps, but that's it
This is a new video model. It is not a replacement for Gemini 4, it is doing something altogether different.
It has been available, since yesterday, within Google Flow. I know, because I used it yesterday. Creatives normally are using Flow or similar third party tools, not APIs or AI Studio. The claim here is that there is more character consistency, which is helpful if true. But that's not something I can see from a little work. Despite the "More Affordable" claim, it costs more, and the outputs doesn't, from my limited experience so far, seem to be significantly better. So I could only, personally, justify pulling this up when character consistency is punching me in the face. Which, to be fair, is a lot of the time, both in my experience, and the experience of other AI film makers I talk to.
This isn't for (most) coders, it hardly matters if it shows up on Flow a little earlier that Google Vids, and, perhaps, it is a little silly to act like it is a nightmare that a rollout occurs over a few days, especially the rollout prioritizes the paying creatives on the tool that are most likely to use.
It shows me that single prompt costs 30 credits. Also shows that 50 credits refresh daily, so I can make 1 video per day for free. I did one, with 20 credits remaining.
It's amazing to me how poor adoption has been for video models, at least in my corner of the internet. I see considerably more Code to Video content from libraries like HyperFrames than any native AI video. It seems that users are much more open to AI coded "Explained style" videos than anything else.
It's still pretty inconsistent, slow, and expensive. I have claude write up massive prompts with reference images and it'll still come out poorly, but since I'm not generating much revenue with the product I use these models for, I just accept a lot of the sloppiness. I have tried a lot of different prompts, I think video just has a lot more free space to differ from our mental models than something like code that is a lot more well-defined.
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[ 0.41 ms ] story [ 85.5 ms ] threadI'm not scratching my head about a "2025 Corolla." Windows 95 and 2000 had this built in, but then they lost it.
I'd prefer it was called Omni 2026.2 instead. It embeds a date and model and would package it as a product for on-premise or local hosting. It'd be easier to sell to the bean counters in the future: "We're running Omni 2026.2, we want to upgrade to Omni 2028."
oh well, I guess we’ll just have to take that enthusiasm and roll it over to all the open weights on providers like fireworks.ai. or others.
i’m so happy I got in early and paid for $200 a month for shit ass Opus 4.6 and sonnet 4.6 and being locked into the absolutely limited Gemini 3.8 flash.
Is being locked in to three obnoxious companies that much better?
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.
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.
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).
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.
YMMV
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.
Love it
This boggles my ears. I've only ever found one guy I can listen to at 2x because he talks... so... slowly.
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.
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.
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).
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 little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic it's sincere. Anyone there overseeing it should truly feel embarrassed.
Off the top of my head: workaday
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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 a multi-agent reviewer) that accelerate our workflows.
Eventually I gave up. Anthropic/OpenAI took < 10 minutes to get things going.
Enabling the same service via Apple Developers meanwhile took me minutes and I never felt lost, confused or frustrated.
Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.
Right. They lack no resources. Therefore, what is happening must be what they want to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you could pin the provider to always get one or the other
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.
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083596911060324570?a=iif1W7...
It's been a baffling question for over a decade (or more)
This could be used as a preface for so many things.
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.
unfortunately, the so-called "best talent" is being hired in management, not engineering or design or UX. :-(
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So, no, it is not astroturfing.
Gemini AI Plus does exist:
https://gemini.google/subscriptions/
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/
Google does tend to have terrible messaging/branding/etc that results in part of these problems.
When Argon first came out, it wasn't included in Antigravity/agy and I personally never saw a Google stated plan on when they would include it, and because they removed Gemini Pro when Argon was released there was a brief window where Antigravity/agy didn't support a "Pro" model at all even for people with a "Pro" subscription.
That said, I'm with you on the idea that Google is roughly on par with everyone else despite the rhetoric here on HN that makes it look like they are way behind. They do have typical Google problems with messaging/branding for their AI products, just like all their other products, but when I use Google models for personal use I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything I get when using Anthropic for work stuff (paid for by the company).
And for context I say this all as someone who is a bit of a Google hater these days (not happy with some recent Android decisions, moved off of gmail to avoid too much Google power concentration, etc).
"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.
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 be the entire organisation, or nothing.
It’s doubly stupid because like millions of people, I initial subscribed as a non-business and was forced to convert by Google!
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.
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.
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 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.
Maybe it's a b2b vs b2c thing.
So, not that easy for me (I should note im not in the USA)
Aside from winning the Nobel prize in chemistry.
Not only is it easy to pay but I also don’t risk getting my account banned.
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!
This narrative seems astroturfed particularly hard on this website. Like Google's AI isnt allowed to be praised on HN.
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.
> 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?
Why is this so difficult to figure out?
In other words, business as usual.
> https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/med...
Text from the first paragraph on the page says
> Today, we’re rolling out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, and making it generally available across the Gemini API and Gemini for business. Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash introduces native 15-second video creation, multi-turn conversational editing capabilities, and enhanced reference following. We have dropped the price 30% from Gemini Omni 1.1 making it available at $0.07 per second for 720p video.
Focus on this part
> We have dropped the price 30%
The text to speech audio says
> We have dropped the price 3%
they might have a composer layer which loads certain components (transparent to you) with and without authentication and mixing different backend sources.
Then they might have templating engines and frameworks.
Sometimes they just don't care but lets be honest: a few new lines are a few bytes.
But the most critical pages go through optimizers for traffic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
Google's main source of revenue is advertising (yes, still).
This is one of paths that serve that.
Still confused? Look at what Meta is doing with end-to-end ad creation.
I'm not saying Omni makes good ads. It's all part of the toolbox.
What a great way to start.
So, to badly impersonate N-Gate, "Business Model: Uber for Getty Images"
Increasing the available range of shot lengths from 10 seconds to 15 seconds gives film makers a wider pallet of options, if the longer shots have continuity, which is the other claim here.
I'm not aware of any "one-shot", one and done, use cases that are much more compelling the clip is 15s vs 10s. But that's not relevant to many people actually using AI video models like this on a daily basis.
My friend on Google ai plus is still stuck on gemini 3.6 flash and now they're taking away 3.1 pro from them too even though it's long obsolete, like zero regard for user interactions here
Google is just beyond me I have no idea what they're doing, and no interest in figuring it out. I use a free gemini flash model in one of my personal apps, but that's it
It has been available, since yesterday, within Google Flow. I know, because I used it yesterday. Creatives normally are using Flow or similar third party tools, not APIs or AI Studio. The claim here is that there is more character consistency, which is helpful if true. But that's not something I can see from a little work. Despite the "More Affordable" claim, it costs more, and the outputs doesn't, from my limited experience so far, seem to be significantly better. So I could only, personally, justify pulling this up when character consistency is punching me in the face. Which, to be fair, is a lot of the time, both in my experience, and the experience of other AI film makers I talk to.
This isn't for (most) coders, it hardly matters if it shows up on Flow a little earlier that Google Vids, and, perhaps, it is a little silly to act like it is a nightmare that a rollout occurs over a few days, especially the rollout prioritizes the paying creatives on the tool that are most likely to use.
Omni 1.2 is showing 18 credit cost in Flow for a six second video.
vs.
10 credits costs for a 6 second video using Omni 1.1.
I'm not sure it's in Google's interest to talk about how much cheaper the model is, while also increasing the cost in Flow.
For example check this: https://youtu.be/m7EcEne_d8Y I didn't believe ai generated video can be this good before watching it.
Google flow is such a joke comparing to seedance or mimimax h3.