> I find it difficult to get invested in Gemini because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways.

I feel like you're being overly dramatic here. Argon was 13 - 15 days.

Argon was announced September 30, made available on October 13 to Ultra everywhere, and Pro in the Gemini App. Pro plans got Argon on October 15 in AGY.

This is the first time they've slow-rolled a model. Who knows how long they'll wait on Carbon.

The Ultra-lite plans ($99/month) get some pretty good quota where you can actually use Argon some more. Maybe Google shouldn't be grouping together plans, but it should also be noted that $20/month also gets you 5TB of storage on Drive. If you paid for Dropbox, you get 3TB for $18/month (without any AI model usage).

(googler, opinions are my own)

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pu_pe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If we go back only 45 days, Opus 5.5 was not even out yet. So for more than a third of the current SOTA model's existence, Google's response to it was under its own embargo. When it was finally out, paying users get 3-4 prompts a day, which means Argon will be experienced by a tiny minority of people, another unforced error on Google's side.

By the time Carbon comes out, I fully expect Anthropic, ChatGPT and/or a Chinese lab to have its answer ready to ship in less time than it took Google to approve a release.

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isqueiros 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Since you're a googler, can you trigger some internal process to improve the connection between google services?

Gemini cannot create "my maps". I like creating a map of stuff for travel and now I ask it to create an importable file (which it doesn't always get right) but it should honestly do that itself.

And I don't mean that from within the Gemini app, I'd like a shareable list of places, which you can do via a very outdated maps UI

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WarmWash 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>can you trigger some internal process to improve the connection between google services?

You might as well be asking an Adobe employee to bring up improving integration with Canva.

	▲	isqueiros 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This would be true if Gemini didn't already have some surface level access with Google maps. They just stopped short of supporting the feature I cared about
	▲	ghurtado 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What do you mean? Doesn't every Googler have weekly meetings with Tim Google?

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seanmcdirmid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You also get YouTube premium and home premium on the Google ultra plan. I didn’t realize how nice it was not to see ads on YouTube, and the home summary of who walked next to my home each day is bizarre. The grouping doesn’t make sense at all, since I would have bought it anyways, but it’s a nice bonus.

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jeffbee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's annoying that there is no way to just pay the marginal difference between Premium Lite and Premium for AI Pro subscribers. I have a bunch of interacting subsidies from Google Fi, Pixel phone purchases, and Google One AI Pro, but it's hard to keep them straight.

	▲	seanmcdirmid an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ya, it was kind of a mess for me also, I had to get support to put my accounts in order after I subscribed.

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jack_pp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

problem is, i don't care about the extra storage at all.

my whole family of 5 people is using in total 160 GB. personally I use about 15 GB

	▲	lanstin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have 160G of screen captures from Tumblr from my then angsty teenage kid. I think my spouse takes a few Gig of photos for each outing we go on. Several people dress for fancy thing via a process involving many clothes changes and even more selfies.

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elictronic 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s hard to get interested in Google products because they throw them out all the time. If it’s not a step change in functionality why even go near their baggage.