I agree. On top of that, in true Google style, basic things just don't work.

Any time I upload an attachment, it just fails with something vague like "couldn't process file". Whether that's a simple .MD or .txt with less than 100 lines or a PDF. I tried making a gem today. It just wouldn't let me save it, with some vague error too.

I also tried having it read and write stuff to "my stuff" and Google drive. But it would consistently write but not be able to read from it again. Or would read one file from Google drive and ignore everything else.

Their models are seriously impressive. But as usual Google sucks at making them work well in real products.

How can the models be impressive if they switch to Chinese mid-sentence? I've observed those bizarre bugs too. Even GPT-3 didn't have those. Maybe GPT-2 did. It's actually impressive that they managed to botch it so badly.

Google is great at some things, but this isn't it.

It's so capable at some things, and others are garbage. I uploaded a photo of some words for a spelling bee and asked it to quiz my kid on the words. The first word it asked, wasn't on the list. After multiple attempts to get it to start asking only the words in the uploaded pic, it did, and then would get the spellings wrong in the Q&A. I gave up.

Agreed on the product. I can't make Gemini read my emails on GMail. One day it says it doesn't have access, the other day it says Query unsuccessful. Claude Desktop has no problem reaching to GMail, on the other hand :)

Sadly true.

It is also one of the worst models to have a sort of ongoing conversation with.

Their models are absolutely not impressive.

Not a single person is using it for coding (outside of Google itself).

Maybe some people on a very generous free plan.

Their model is a fine mid 2025 model, backed by enormous compute resources and an army of GDM engineers to help the “researchers” keep the model on task as it traverses the “tree of thoughts”.

But that isn’t “the model” that’s an old model backed by massive money.

OpenAI is the best thing that happened to Google apparently.

Wartime Google gave us Google+. Wartime Google is still bumbling, and despite OpenAI's numerous missteps, I don't think it has to worry about Google hurting its business yet.

> I feel like most of human endeavor will soon be just about trying to continuously show that AI's don't have AGI.

I think you overestimate how much your average person-on-the-street cares about LLM benchmarks. They already treat ChatGPT or whichever as generally intelligent (including to their own detriment), are frustrated about their social media feeds filling up with slop and, maybe, if they're white-collar, worry about their jobs disappearing due to AI. Apart from a tiny minority in some specific field, people already know themselves to be less intelligent along any measurable axis than someone somewhere.

Soon they can drop the bioweapon to welcome our replacement.

"AGI" doesn't mean anything concrete, so it's all a bunch of non-sequiturs. Your goalposts don't exist.

Anyone with any sense is interested in how well these tools work and how they can be harnessed, not some imaginary milestone that is not defined and cannot be measured.

I find Gemini's web page much snappier to use than ChatGPT - I've largely swapped to it for most things except more agentic tasks.

Google privacy cred is ... excellent? The worst data breach I know of them having was a flaw that allowed access to names and emails of 500k users.

> Gemini's UX ... is the worst of all the AI apps

Been using Gemini + OpenCode for the past couple weeks.

Suddenly, I get a "you need a Gemini Access Code license" error but when you go to the project page there is no mention of this or how to get the license.

You really feel the "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to." [0] when you use these Google products.

PS for those that don't get the reference: US phone companies in the 1970s had a monopoly on local and long distance phone service. Similar to Google for search/ads (really a "near" monopoly but close enough).

0 - https://vimeo.com/355556831

You mean AI Studio or something like that, right? Because I can't see a problem with Google's standard chat interface. All other AI offerings are confusing both regarding their intended use and their UX, though, I have to concur with that.

Gemini is completely unusable in VS Code. It's rated 2/5 stars, pathetic: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Google.g...

Requests regularly time out, the whole window freezes, it gets stuck in schizophrenic loops, edits cannot be reverted and more.

It doesn't even come close to Claude or ChatGPT.

You sound like Russ Hanneman from SV