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