if they throw in youtube premium in that package then I might reconisder
they gave away so much pro that they need to have smaller usage levels than competitors or they'll lose a ton of money. $20 was already a loss for users actually using their quota. the majority of pro users are paying far less than that.
so they'll lose their paying users, and keep their free or subsudized, which will make the economics even worse.
I use the hell out of both. Kind of sad that they took Spark out of beta-access, being able to orchestrate via your phone on something that has direct access to your Drive meant I was authoring skills and other functionality on a schedule with spreadsheets serving as databases, deterministic tests, etc.
Hope they roll it out to a full feature soon
More specifically, who are they targeting with Argon and why is it behind the Ultra plan? Who is paying $99/month if not developers?
Corporate companies. Bog-standard office workers don't need top-of-the-line Mythos intelligence, just something to add to Google Workspace. I personally doubt developers use Gemini for coding beyond marketing materials.
There is another subset in the Google Workspace for enterprise clients.
Because if it’s not, and it’s not available to all paying users (Right now, it’s only available to Ultra users), then they are behind the curve if they’re treating it like Fable.
It’s tone deaf.
Whether it's actually better than OAI/Anthropic offerings, probably not, but if Google has managed to get back to parity, that's good for competition, prices, and increased model performance in the future. Three strong western competitors is better than two.
Unique users, maybe. But a simple query that's answered in a paragraph is negligible compared to devs running agents continuously for tens of hours.
When I see non technical people use that Google reply I'd be surprised if it's more than 1k output tokens, and with a tiny model. So a 3000x in output tokens, on a model at least 10x as expensive, I wouldn't be surprised if hardware usage is 30.000x for a dev that uses coding subs vs someone who uses the Google AI overview a couple of times a day.
And that's not counting the absurd difference in cache reads.