I agree. Right now it's not very useful, but has the potential to be if they keep investing in it. Maybe.
I think Google, Microsoft, etc are all pressured to release something for fear of appearing to be behind the curve.
Apple is clearly taking the opposite approach re: speed to market.
I wonder if there isn't a deeper, more worrying (for Google) reason behind that - that AI is killing their margin.
Google has always been about delivering top notch services, and winning by being able to do that cheaper than the competition.
It's "in their DNA" - everyone knows that using links to a website as a quality signal was a really good idea in the early days of Google, but what's a little less well known is that the true stroke of genius was the algorithmic efficiency of PageRank.
Similarly for GMail. Remember when it launched, 1 GB of free storage was just completely out of every competitor's league?
It may just be that this recipe of being smarter than everyone on algorithms and on datacenter operations might just not work anymore in the age of modern machine learning.
All the hard scalability stuff, they've already done before. Gmail exists, the Gemini API exists.
If they're not getting it to work, there must be another reason. They just can't afford to provide it at a price point that users accept.