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  • Hacker News
  • Somewhat tangential, but when Google doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money and make heavy investment in infrastructure that they rent to those participating in the churn, while still they are "losing the AI race".

    But when Apple doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money, and needs to rely on Google for AI services, then this is "the Apple way", "do nothing and still win" uber-pragmatic 5D chess game.

    by wolvesechoes
  • This is Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows all over again.
    by magekinnarus
  • - eventually they ll beat both openAI and Anthropic because I can literally hear google saying this in bane's voice

    - "Ah so you think data is your ally? you merely scraped data, i was born in it, moulded by it, did not spare a single user until I was already a man"

    by vivzkestrel
  • Then hand out free annual pro subscriptions with phone data plans in India. I wonder how many of those are behind the 1B.

    That's how I got mine, and I'm not in India. Cost like 20 bucks or sth. No warranty it will last a full year, but it's been over a quarter now.

    by cromka
  • Gemini has gotten wildly worse in recent time, almost incapable of answering a question without a search, lengthy "thinking time" for trivial questions that no doubt is intended to mask waiting for inference resources
    by nylonstrung
  • I was skeptical at first but these days I use Gemini on Android phone and Android Auto, search AI summary, and lately Gemma 4 a lot.

    Skepticism is still needed though. The other day I asked Gemini while driving if there's a HoV lane going from 105 E to 110 S. It said yes. Actually there one to 110 N but not S. I did not act upon it because my co-passenger verified that Gemini was wrong.

    Search summary is useful but not for things that require deeper technical expertise- those result in bad hallucination.

    With corporate crunch on token budget, I've also started avoiding Claude and increasingly using opencode+Gemma 4, and developing some system prompts to iteratively improve the results.

    by esalman
  • I'm sure my accidental clicks count for some of that. In the results page, they put an "AI Mode" button where the "All" button was, and the font doesn't have serifs on the 'I', so any time I return back from an image or video search, I end up on their Gemini page, because I don't notice the subtle change until I've already clicked on it.

    Clearly they meant for people to click on it on accident, because it puts "All" in the second tab, and it otherwise doesn't make any sense to have the default tab be the second one.

    The only time I use the Gemini response on purpose is when Cloudflare tells me I'm a bot and won't let me visit a web page, so I ask Gemini to scrape the relevant information for me, because bots are quickly becoming the only thing that can make it paste a Captcha. Sometimes that requires using the 'Show more' button, and it's not clear if that counts, too.

    Also, I've heard they've begun rolling out replacing the Android voice assistant with Gemini, so a bunch of people are using it without trying to, even when they'd prefer the voice assistant. From what I've heard, the most common uses for voice assistants are setting reminders and controlling media players, and Gemini is much worse at that than the old Android voice assistant.

    by dlcarrier
  • I'm sure if you make Google Meet appear every time you made a Google query, it would also be the 'fastest-growing product ever'
    by HDBaseT

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