I recently canceled my Google One subscription because getting accurate answers out of Gemini for chat is basically impossible afaict. Whether I enable thinking makes no difference: Gemini always answers me super quickly, rarely actually looks something up, and lies to me. It has a really bad unchecked hallucination problem because it prioritizes speed over accuracy and (astonishingly, to me) is way more hesitant to run web searches than ChatGPT or Claude.

Maybe the model is good but the product is so shitty that I can't perceive its virtues while using it. I would characterize it as pretty much unusable (including as the "Google Assistant" on my phone).

It's extremely frustrating every way that I've used it but it seems like Gemini and Gemma get nothing but praise here.

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mike_hearn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

My wife was amazed to discover that Gemini recommended to her a local business that turned out to be in another country, and then after she checked and corrected it, it recommended a second that was marked as permanently closed on Google Maps.

ChatGPT got it right first time. Baffling.

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j45 a day ago | parent [-]

ChatGPT has more time correcting those things.

	▲	mike_hearn a day ago \| parent [-]
		This was the Gemini chat interface! It just didn't seem to be connected to Google Maps

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neonstatic 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used Gemma 3 for quite a few things offline and found it to be very helpful. Your experience with Gemini is very similar to mine, though. I hate the way it speaks with this fake-excited, reddit-coded, condescending tone and it is useless for coding.

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staticman2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've found Gemini works better for search when used through a Perplexity subscription. (Though these things can quickly change).

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logicchains 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Recently I had a pretty basic question about whether there was a Factorio mod for something so decided to ask it to Gemini, it hallucinated not one but two sadly non-existing mods. Even Grok is better at search.

	▲	whimblepop 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Whenever I ask it questions about videogames (even very old ones), the odds that it will lie to me are very high. I only see LLMs get those right when they go look them up online. The other thing that kills me about Gemini is that the voice recognition is god-awful. All of the chat interfaces I use have transcriptions that include errors (which the bot usually treats unthinkingly as what I actually said, instead of acting as if we may be using a fallible voice transcription), but Gemini's is the worst by far. I often have to start conversations over because of such badly mangled transcriptions. The accuracy problems are the biggest and most important frustrations, but I also find Gemini insufferably chummy and condescending. It often resorts to ELI5 metaphors when describing things to me where the whole metaphor is based on some tenuous link to some small factoid it thinks it remembers about my life. The experiences it seems people get out of Gemini today seem like a waste of a frontier lab's resources tbf. If I wanted fast but lower quality I'd go to one of the many smaller providers that aren't frontier labs because lots of them are great at speed and/or efficiency. (If I wanted an AI companion, Google doesn't seem like the right choice either.)