Also a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but their stubbornness in artificially splitting their consumer and enterprise products is extremely annoying. It's pretty weird that I have access to more powerful tools when using my personal Google account compared to my corporate Google Workspace account.

It's absolute insanity. They have all the resources to have been able to lead from the front with this new technology. They have the products and users to integrate this technology into people's already existing lives. But they keep fumbling.

They're not even benchmarking against other models now, just against themselves - which tells you everything you need to know.

> Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success

This is still very early days. Who is "on top" has flipped back and forth many times already. The next frontier model release (from whomever) will change things again.

Aren’t the subscriptions extremely subsidized and burning cash for Anthropic and OpenAI? A reasonable explanation is they’re simply abstaining from the war of attrition, especially given cheaper comparable models are breaking the illusion that the “frontier of intelligence” has any kind of per token margin.

> I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions.

Likewise. This seems like a common feel. I have at least spent $4000 and likely a lot more on Gemini API because I really wanted them to win. I gave up.

Google Gemini agy is not allowing you to use your token via your own harness. My own harness is far more efficient than agy. They can take a simple stance - if you exceed your token limit they block you - with the 5 hr limit they are already doing this . so there should be no reason to block you from using your own harness - if you are more efficient - you gain - if you are less you lose .

They are not allowing me to hit their endpoints which agy hits - it's frustrating . i tried to hack it with gemini itself. what i love about gemini is it's so encouraging and ready to help you - even against the agy client : ) .

Even though im so frustrated with this - i still love Gemini for some reason ! Most encouraging model in the world!

i've got to wonder how much of this is intentional, and how much of this is just google being their usual terrible selves at anything consumer-product related.

Google's biggest and most important customer for all this AI stuff is google. Do they actually want other customers, or is having other people use their AI just an annoyance at this point, where we use up compute that they'd rather use internally...

I trust Google to:

* Abruptly ban me and all users from a Google Workspace for no reason whatsoever.

* Abruptly shut down a service.

I'll never give Google my direct money.

They'll probably be back later. It's very possible they are "saving up" for a much bigger run.

+1 same way vscode killed its usage base and gave it to its fork - cursor

> they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions

This is what happens when you put a McKinsey consultant in the role of CEO of an organization where product managers run the asylum instead of engineers.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is the specialty of product managers.

It's funny that they triggered the infamous "Code Red" moment in OpenAI when the 3-3.1 models came out. I switched to using them for a lot of single-shot LLM calls because they were fast and cheap. Their only area that they were lacking in was agentic/tool calling.

Needless to say 3.5 was a disappointment. Curious to see 3.6.

> Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products.

HN lives in a bubble.

I have German/Italian/Polish clients virtually all use Gemini and NotebookLM. Talking insurance, banking, consulting, legal.

The real world doesn't look at pointless benchmarks on writing react tailwind crap, they are already google suite users, get the tools, test them and adopt them, end of story.

It's going to be like with angular, never mentioned on the net, widely used in the real world.

They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up

That sounds awful.

For those of us who don't follow the AI hype cycle, what does that have to do with the topic of this thread: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber?