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I recently canceled my Google One subscription because getting accurate answers out of Gemini for chat is basically impossible afaict. Whether I enable thinking makes no difference: Gemini always answers me super quickly, rarely actually looks something up, and lies to me. It has a really bad unchecked hallucination problem because it prioritizes speed over accuracy and (astonishingly, to me) is way more hesitant to run web searches than ChatGPT or Claude.

Maybe the model is good but the product is so shitty that I can't perceive its virtues while using it. I would characterize it as pretty much unusable (including as the "Google Assistant" on my phone).

It's extremely frustrating every way that I've used it but it seems like Gemini and Gemma get nothing but praise here.

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My wife was amazed to discover that Gemini recommended to her a local business that turned out to be in another country, and then after she checked and corrected it, it recommended a second that was marked as permanently closed on Google Maps.

ChatGPT got it right first time. Baffling.

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I used Gemma 3 for quite a few things offline and found it to be very helpful. Your experience with Gemini is very similar to mine, though. I hate the way it speaks with this fake-excited, reddit-coded, condescending tone and it is useless for coding.
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I've found Gemini works better for search when used through a Perplexity subscription. (Though these things can quickly change).
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Recently I had a pretty basic question about whether there was a Factorio mod for something so decided to ask it to Gemini, it hallucinated not one but two sadly non-existing mods. Even Grok is better at search.
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Whenever I ask it questions about videogames (even very old ones), the odds that it will lie to me are very high. I only see LLMs get those right when they go look them up online.

The other thing that kills me about Gemini is that the voice recognition is god-awful. All of the chat interfaces I use have transcriptions that include errors (which the bot usually treats unthinkingly as what I actually said, instead of acting as if we may be using a fallible voice transcription), but Gemini's is the worst by far. I often have to start conversations over because of such badly mangled transcriptions.

The accuracy problems are the biggest and most important frustrations, but I also find Gemini insufferably chummy and condescending. It often resorts to ELI5 metaphors when describing things to me where the whole metaphor is based on some tenuous link to some small factoid it thinks it remembers about my life.

The experiences it seems people get out of Gemini today seem like a waste of a frontier lab's resources tbf. If I wanted fast but lower quality I'd go to one of the many smaller providers that aren't frontier labs because lots of them are great at speed and/or efficiency. (If I wanted an AI companion, Google doesn't seem like the right choice either.)

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I agree with the theory and maybe consumers will too. But damn, the actual products are bad.
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Tiny AI labs with a fraction of Google's resources still turn out amazing open weights. But besides the logistics, the other aspect is can I use it? Gemini (and some other models) have a habit of dropping conversations altogether if it's "uncomfortable" with your question. Recently I was just asking it about financial implications of the war. It decided my ideas were so crazy that I must be upset, and refused to tell me anything else about finance in that chat. Whereas other models (not abliterated, just normal models) gave me information without argument, moralizing, or gaslighting. I think most people are gonna prefer the non-nerfed models, even if they aren't SOTA, because nobody wants to have an argument with their computer.
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At the start of last year Gemma2 made the fewest mistakes when I was trying out self-hosted LLMs for language translation. And at the time it had a non open source license.

Really eager to test this version with all the extra capabilities provided.

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Not sure why you're being downvoted, the other thing Google has is Google. They just have to spend the effort/resources to keep up and wait for everyone else to go bankrupt. At the end of the day I think Google will be the eventual LLM winner. I think this is why Meta isn't really in the race and just releases open weight models, the writing is on the wall. Also, probably why Apple went ahead and signed a deal with Google and not OpenAI or Anthropic.
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The rumor is also that Meta is looking to lease Gemini similar to Apple, as their recent efforts reportedly came up short of expectations.
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I don't know why I am downvoted but Google has data, expertise, hardware and deep pockets. This whole LLM thing is invented at Google and machine learning ecosystem libraries come from Google. I don't know how people can be so irrational discounting Google's muscle.

Others have just borrowed data, money, hardware and they would run out of resources for sure.

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Same can be said for java, yet google own android.
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This remains true so long as advertisers give Google money.
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Why wouldnt advertisers give Google money? Are you noticing any shift in trend?
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