alt Hacker NewsPeople really seem to struggle with this and I can't figure out why... Like it kind of just reads like astroturfing in every thread. I downloaded agy, purchased a subscription that the splash page said "includes Argon" and it... works?
3.8 flash and argon have been great FYI. Can't tell a difference between any of the claude models I use at work, minus actually being able to read what it writes.
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I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash. In consequence, I never use Gemini anymore, and instead have a PAYG plan on Deep Infra.
So, no, it is not astroturfing.
Yep, seriously. We live in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic each have about 60 different products named with variations of "Codex"/"ChatGPT" or "Claude", on top of a model matrix of about 100 different choices of name/version/reasoning level/variant. But somehow Google's comparatively streamlined offerings are impossibly confusing for HN to understand.
"How do I even pay for it?" is particularly baffling to me considering it's literally just included in their normal range of Google One subscriptions that bundle Drive/etc which have been around for years.
You pick a plan and pay for it, and sign in to whichever app you're using like Gemini chat (ChatGPT/Claude Chat) or Antigravity (Codex/Claude Code).
AI Studio is the developer console (OpenAI Platform/Claude Platform). Vertex AI is the Google Cloud enterprise platform (using GPT or Claude models via AWS Bedrock/Azure AI Foundry).
Pretty much every product is a 1:1 equivalent with the same offering from OpenAI/Anthropic + Azure/AWS. Google is both a hyperscaler and an AI lab, so the venn diagram includes both the direct OpenAI/Anthropic products and what they also serve for enterprises via Azure/AWS.
I get that Google does bad stuff and isn't popular on HN which is understandable, but the specific criticisms really don't make sense. The entire AI developer/consumer space is messy and confusing but that's an industry wide complaint not specific to Google unless they should just not compete on certain verticals.
> People really seem to struggle with this and I can't figure out why... Like it kind of just reads like astroturfing in every thread. I downloaded agy, purchased a subscription that the splash page said "includes Argon" and it... works?
Google does tend to have terrible messaging/branding/etc that results in part of these problems.
When Argon first came out, it wasn't included in Antigravity/agy and I personally never saw a Google stated plan on when they would include it, and because they removed Gemini Pro when Argon was released there was a brief window where Antigravity/agy didn't support a "Pro" model at all even for people with a "Pro" subscription.
That said, I'm with you on the idea that Google is roughly on par with everyone else despite the rhetoric here on HN that makes it look like they are way behind. They do have typical Google problems with messaging/branding for their AI products, just like all their other products, but when I use Google models for personal use I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything I get when using Anthropic for work stuff (paid for by the company).
And for context I say this all as someone who is a bit of a Google hater these days (not happy with some recent Android decisions, moved off of gmail to avoid too much Google power concentration, etc).