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I use anthropic's models daily, and sometimes switch to Gemini. Google is losing the marketing front BADLY, but their AI service is surprisingly great. It's f

I use anthropic's models daily, and sometimes switch to Gemini. Google is losing the marketing front BADLY, but their AI service is surprisingly great. It's far cheaper than anthropic for one. and for my kind of research it's just better.

enos_feedler 4mo ago
who cares about marketing when you have distribution? Probably a smart move to pump dollars into the product and not the marketing.
- jgalt212 4mo ago
  in high margin businesses, customer acquisition is everything.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4mo ago
    If your product becomes commoditized, it’s no longer a high margin business
    - aethelraed 4mo ago
      You can have a high accounting margin and a product with price equal to economic marginal cost—externalities, cost of capital, barriers to entry… DRAM is a commodity but has (currently) a high margin.
    - mandeepj 4mo ago
      > If your product becomes commoditized Depends on the product - whether protein bars, salty chips, cellular service, or IPhone or something else. If your product has a flavor, it’s never going to get commoditized. Coke still tastes better than Pepsi.
      - collingreen 4mo ago
        This is the power of a brand. Kirkland and some private label products are literally the same as the competitor products and yet are perceived differently. Even in your Pepsi vs Coke example, Pepsi routinely wins in blind taste tests but there are more "Coke people". It will be interesting to see if the LLM companies can establish their own "brand" and how they will do that. LLM voice is a thing but not sure if it's a good thing people will use to hang their self identity on. Distillation of models and constant training also make this complicated. Claude code is winning on harness and ux right now but it seems precarious and also easy to commoditize. I think elon tried to add branding to his chatbot pretty intelligently by being iconically crude/evil/"anti woke" since it's both highly visible and less likely to be copied. We live in fascinating times!
  - enos_feedler 4mo ago
    And Google acquired you in 1998 with search.
vasco 4mo ago
Is it? My mom and all her friends use "the intelligence". What is it? Gemini, because it's on their android phone.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  Apple played a blinder by calling it "Apple Intelligence". Well done lads
sumoboy 4mo ago
I think Google is a bit sandbagging here knowing they have all the data and likely better models hiding. My theory is it's a bit of not disrupting the stock market direction by exposing whose really the boss. If they can do it cheaper, faster, and better, people start asking questions, especially with upcoming IPO's.
- mgfist 4mo ago
  This makes no sense. Google is beholden to its own shareholders, not the markets at large. In any case, it's well known that devs in Google have liked anthropic/openai models for coding more than gemini, so unless they're hiding their best models from the people within, I think it's just the case that they're behind.
  - lukeschlather 4mo ago
    Coding is a pretty small slice of the markets in play. Google's models are driving cars right now. Using coding agents doesn't give much insight into performance in the broader world; I would assume assume Google is performing better in general even if Claude or Codex is currently outperforming for coding.
    - mgfist 4mo ago
      > Coding is a pretty small slice of the markets in play. I don't think that's true, mostly in that a lot of usecases are solved via coding models + a harness. > Google's models are driving cars right now. Yes + other models like alphafold. But those are (relatively) specialized models. Besides, the comment I was responding to was saying Google is sandbagging the market to keep it calm or something. I don't disagree that Google is doing well overall and has some clear advantages
  - hattmall 4mo ago
    It's more that they know they can eventually clone any successes the other companies have and steal their market share. Their really is no moat. In a more normal environment they would be buyout candidates but that's a bit too far gone at this point, so you just let them run until they are out of gas and Google can benefit from any advances without upfronting the cost. Even with anthropics record breaking revenue growth I don't see how the pure AI companies can sustain, but the catch-22 is that any obvious pivot proves that. This puts the more traditional tech companies in position to ride the back of the wave until the growth curve tops.
tempest_ 4mo ago
I have not tried the Gemini CLI in a few months but when I did it was a shit show. Google makes it very hard to use their shit and it was full of bugs. Anthropic's current run is based entirely around Claude Code in this space and the last time I used the gemeini-cli it wouldnt give me access to the latest models and I was paying them for the privilege
- Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
  Google trashed the Gemini CLI client and replaced it with agy (antigravity), which is written in go and is much nicer.
  - tempest_ 4mo ago
    So they did. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/discussions/27274 https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/discussions/2727... I get the complaints in that thread but I still think it is hilarious. That repo is a gong show to random shit and perhaps one of the best worst examples of "opensource" LLM development.
  - throwawaycan 4mo ago
    Interesting you say that. Every user I speak to says antigravity cli is missing lots of features and Gemini cli was working quite well. Same for me.
    - Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
      It's not as feature rich, but has also not crashed once for me, unlike gemini cli, which was a flickery, unstable mess.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  It will also just sit there "thinking" for ages, if whatever you are doing requires an input (like sudo) Sometimes you have to tab across and give it a PW, but it seemingly is incapable of parsing that, and just asking. Kiro, what we use at work, on the other hand will just prompt you. (And doesn't like taking credentials directly)
lemax 4mo ago
I'm quite certain that Google's AI services are likely the most used in the world right now by virtue of having the widest distribution. It's in the search box. It's on your Android phone. Just because they aren't the preferred coding or research agent does not mean they are losing - that's a pretty small slice.
- dansquizsoft 4mo ago
  It can be everywhere, but that doesn't mean users are paying or even value it.
  - brookst 4mo ago
    See also: Windows / Notepad / M365 / GitHub / Paint / Xbox / Azure / Solitaire / D365 / Security Copilot.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- pineapple_opus 4mo ago
  Yeah this seems true. Claude Code are famously dubbed as best AI coding agent, but google doesn't care about that niche I guess. Somehow, I still rely on google search as they have diversified it. If you ask questions, it will enable "AI overview" , but if we search about particular object/platform like "Google stock" or "bbc news", it will give the old classic search experience and we woulnd't need to swallow "AI overview" pill in that case.
  - marysol5 4mo ago
    I tried using Gemini CLI to sort some code issues for me, ran out of tokens mid-way through, even though I have Gemini Pro. Turns out licensing is separate for "code" and "pro"...
    - freedomben 4mo ago
      Same happened to me. That was the death knell for Gemini as a coding agent to me. I even paid for a whole year... I highly suspect they opaquely lowered usage limits on me.
marysol5 4mo ago
We use Kiro (AWS) and Gemini (Google) at work. Kiro is of course really good to back into AWS stuff, it knows more about AWS than Amazon themselves! Gemini is really good at understanding my inane ramble and mis-spelling
lanthissa 4mo ago
flash 3.5 is the best price/performance model for what i'm doing. I had been using opus for everything but as we started running many agents at once, and then eventually agent managing sub agents frontier is not an option. we started model testing the cost/performance of our skills and agents and flash 3.5 wins in most things. As people develop harnesses for their codebase i think the intelligence required comes down a lot.

enos_feedler 4mo ago

who cares about marketing when you have distribution? Probably a smart move to pump dollars into the product and not the marketing.

jgalt212 4mo ago
in high margin businesses, customer acquisition is everything.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4mo ago
  If your product becomes commoditized, it’s no longer a high margin business
  - aethelraed 4mo ago
    You can have a high accounting margin and a product with price equal to economic marginal cost—externalities, cost of capital, barriers to entry… DRAM is a commodity but has (currently) a high margin.
  - mandeepj 4mo ago
    > If your product becomes commoditized Depends on the product - whether protein bars, salty chips, cellular service, or IPhone or something else. If your product has a flavor, it’s never going to get commoditized. Coke still tastes better than Pepsi.
    - collingreen 4mo ago
      This is the power of a brand. Kirkland and some private label products are literally the same as the competitor products and yet are perceived differently. Even in your Pepsi vs Coke example, Pepsi routinely wins in blind taste tests but there are more "Coke people". It will be interesting to see if the LLM companies can establish their own "brand" and how they will do that. LLM voice is a thing but not sure if it's a good thing people will use to hang their self identity on. Distillation of models and constant training also make this complicated. Claude code is winning on harness and ux right now but it seems precarious and also easy to commoditize. I think elon tried to add branding to his chatbot pretty intelligently by being iconically crude/evil/"anti woke" since it's both highly visible and less likely to be copied. We live in fascinating times!
- enos_feedler 4mo ago
  And Google acquired you in 1998 with search.

vasco 4mo ago

Is it? My mom and all her friends use "the intelligence". What is it? Gemini, because it's on their android phone.

marysol5 4mo ago
Apple played a blinder by calling it "Apple Intelligence". Well done lads

sumoboy 4mo ago

I think Google is a bit sandbagging here knowing they have all the data and likely better models hiding. My theory is it's a bit of not disrupting the stock market direction by exposing whose really the boss. If they can do it cheaper, faster, and better, people start asking questions, especially with upcoming IPO's.

mgfist 4mo ago
This makes no sense. Google is beholden to its own shareholders, not the markets at large. In any case, it's well known that devs in Google have liked anthropic/openai models for coding more than gemini, so unless they're hiding their best models from the people within, I think it's just the case that they're behind.
- lukeschlather 4mo ago
  Coding is a pretty small slice of the markets in play. Google's models are driving cars right now. Using coding agents doesn't give much insight into performance in the broader world; I would assume assume Google is performing better in general even if Claude or Codex is currently outperforming for coding.
  - mgfist 4mo ago
    > Coding is a pretty small slice of the markets in play. I don't think that's true, mostly in that a lot of usecases are solved via coding models + a harness. > Google's models are driving cars right now. Yes + other models like alphafold. But those are (relatively) specialized models. Besides, the comment I was responding to was saying Google is sandbagging the market to keep it calm or something. I don't disagree that Google is doing well overall and has some clear advantages
- hattmall 4mo ago
  It's more that they know they can eventually clone any successes the other companies have and steal their market share. Their really is no moat. In a more normal environment they would be buyout candidates but that's a bit too far gone at this point, so you just let them run until they are out of gas and Google can benefit from any advances without upfronting the cost. Even with anthropics record breaking revenue growth I don't see how the pure AI companies can sustain, but the catch-22 is that any obvious pivot proves that. This puts the more traditional tech companies in position to ride the back of the wave until the growth curve tops.

tempest_ 4mo ago

I have not tried the Gemini CLI in a few months but when I did it was a shit show. Google makes it very hard to use their shit and it was full of bugs. Anthropic's current run is based entirely around Claude Code in this space and the last time I used the gemeini-cli it wouldnt give me access to the latest models and I was paying them for the privilege

Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
Google trashed the Gemini CLI client and replaced it with agy (antigravity), which is written in go and is much nicer.
- tempest_ 4mo ago
  So they did. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/discussions/27274 https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/discussions/2727... I get the complaints in that thread but I still think it is hilarious. That repo is a gong show to random shit and perhaps one of the best worst examples of "opensource" LLM development.
- throwawaycan 4mo ago
  Interesting you say that. Every user I speak to says antigravity cli is missing lots of features and Gemini cli was working quite well. Same for me.
  - Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
    It's not as feature rich, but has also not crashed once for me, unlike gemini cli, which was a flickery, unstable mess.
marysol5 4mo ago
It will also just sit there "thinking" for ages, if whatever you are doing requires an input (like sudo) Sometimes you have to tab across and give it a PW, but it seemingly is incapable of parsing that, and just asking. Kiro, what we use at work, on the other hand will just prompt you. (And doesn't like taking credentials directly)

lemax 4mo ago

I'm quite certain that Google's AI services are likely the most used in the world right now by virtue of having the widest distribution. It's in the search box. It's on your Android phone. Just because they aren't the preferred coding or research agent does not mean they are losing - that's a pretty small slice.

dansquizsoft 4mo ago
It can be everywhere, but that doesn't mean users are paying or even value it.
- brookst 4mo ago
  See also: Windows / Notepad / M365 / GitHub / Paint / Xbox / Azure / Solitaire / D365 / Security Copilot.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
pineapple_opus 4mo ago
Yeah this seems true. Claude Code are famously dubbed as best AI coding agent, but google doesn't care about that niche I guess. Somehow, I still rely on google search as they have diversified it. If you ask questions, it will enable "AI overview" , but if we search about particular object/platform like "Google stock" or "bbc news", it will give the old classic search experience and we woulnd't need to swallow "AI overview" pill in that case.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  I tried using Gemini CLI to sort some code issues for me, ran out of tokens mid-way through, even though I have Gemini Pro. Turns out licensing is separate for "code" and "pro"...
  - freedomben 4mo ago
    Same happened to me. That was the death knell for Gemini as a coding agent to me. I even paid for a whole year... I highly suspect they opaquely lowered usage limits on me.

marysol5 4mo ago

We use Kiro (AWS) and Gemini (Google) at work. Kiro is of course really good to back into AWS stuff, it knows more about AWS than Amazon themselves! Gemini is really good at understanding my inane ramble and mis-spelling

lanthissa 4mo ago

flash 3.5 is the best price/performance model for what i'm doing. I had been using opus for everything but as we started running many agents at once, and then eventually agent managing sub agents frontier is not an option. we started model testing the cost/performance of our skills and agents and flash 3.5 wins in most things. As people develop harnesses for their codebase i think the intelligence required comes down a lot.