Any time I upload an attachment, it just fails with something vague like "couldn't process file". Whether that's a simple .MD or .txt with less than 100 lines or a PDF. I tried making a gem today. It just wouldn't let me save it, with some vague error too.
I also tried having it read and write stuff to "my stuff" and Google drive. But it would consistently write but not be able to read from it again. Or would read one file from Google drive and ignore everything else.
Their models are seriously impressive. But as usual Google sucks at making them work well in real products.
Context window blowouts? All the time, but never document upload failures.
Google is great at some things, but this isn't it.
It is also one of the worst models to have a sort of ongoing conversation with.
Not a single person is using it for coding (outside of Google itself).
Maybe some people on a very generous free plan.
Their model is a fine mid 2025 model, backed by enormous compute resources and an army of GDM engineers to help the “researchers” keep the model on task as it traverses the “tree of thoughts”.
But that isn’t “the model” that’s an old model backed by massive money.
Peacetime Google is slow, bumbling, bureaucratic. Wartime Google gets shit done.
I don’t think this is intentional, but I think they stopped fighting SEO entirely to focus on AI. Recipes are the best example - completely gutted and almost all receive sites (therefore the entire search page) run by the same company. I didn’t realize how utterly consolidated huge portions of information on the internet was until every recipe site about 3 months ago simultaneously implemented the same anti-Adblock.
I think you overestimate how much your average person-on-the-street cares about LLM benchmarks. They already treat ChatGPT or whichever as generally intelligent (including to their own detriment), are frustrated about their social media feeds filling up with slop and, maybe, if they're white-collar, worry about their jobs disappearing due to AI. Apart from a tiny minority in some specific field, people already know themselves to be less intelligent along any measurable axis than someone somewhere.
Anyone with any sense is interested in how well these tools work and how they can be harnessed, not some imaginary milestone that is not defined and cannot be measured.
Afaik, Google has had no breaches ever.
and when I swap back into the Gemini app on my iPhone after a minute or so the chat disappears. and other weird passive-aggressive take-my-toys-away behavior if you don't bare your body and soul to Googlezebub.
ChatGPT and Grok work so much better without accounts or with high privacy settings.
Been using Gemini + OpenCode for the past couple weeks.
Suddenly, I get a "you need a Gemini Access Code license" error but when you go to the project page there is no mention of this or how to get the license.
You really feel the "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to." [0] when you use these Google products.
PS for those that don't get the reference: US phone companies in the 1970s had a monopoly on local and long distance phone service. Similar to Google for search/ads (really a "near" monopoly but close enough).
Requests regularly time out, the whole window freezes, it gets stuck in schizophrenic loops, edits cannot be reverted and more.
It doesn't even come close to Claude or ChatGPT.