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Comment by arresin | Hacker News Reader

Not quantized?

Not quantized. Weights are the same.

If we did change the model, we'd release it as a new model with a new name in the API (e.g., o3-turbo-2025-06-10). It would be very annoying to API customers if we ever silently changed models, so we never do this [1].

[1] `chatgpt-4o-latest` being an explicit exception

It was definitely annoying when o1 disappeared over night, my impression is that was better at some tasks than o3.

Google could at least learn something from this attitude, given their recent 03-25 -> 05-06 model alias switcharoo with 0 notice :)

That is a preview / beta model with no expectation of stability. Google did nothing wrong there. No one should be using a preview model in production.

Hard disagree. Of course technically they didn't do anything explicitly against the public guidance (the checks and balances would never let them), but naming a model with a date very strongly implies immutability.

It's the same logic of why UB in C/C++ isn't a license to do whatever the compiler wants. We're humans and we operate on implications, common-sense assumptions and trust.

The model is labelled as Preview. There are no guarantees of stability or availability for Preview models. Not intended for production workloads.

https://cloud.google.com/products?hl=en#product-launch-stage...

"At Preview, products or features are ready for testing by customers. Preview offerings are often publicly announced, but are not necessarily feature-complete, and no SLAs or technical support commitments are provided for these. Unless stated otherwise by Google, Preview offerings are intended for use in test environments only. The average Preview stage lasts about six months."

There hasn't been a non-preview Gemini since...November? The previews are the same as everyone else's release cadance, "preview" is just a magic wand that meant the Launchcal (google's internal signoff tool, i.e. "wave will never happen again) needs less signoffs. Then it got to the point date-pinned models were getting swapped in, in the name of doing us a favor, and it's a...novel idea, we can both agree at the least.

I bet someone at Google would be a bit surprised to see someone jumping to legalese to act like this...novelty...is inherently due to the preview status, and based on anything more than a sense that there's no net harm done to us if it costs the same and is better.

I'm not sure they're wrong.

But it also leads to a sort of "nobody knows how anything works because we have 2^N configs and 5 bits" - for instance, 05-06 was also upgraded to 06-05. Except it wasn't, if you sent variable thinking to 05-06 after upgrade it'd fail. (and don't get me started on the 5 different thinking configurations for Gemini 2.5 flash thinking vs. gemini 05-06 vs. 06-05 and 0 thinking)

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say.

It's a preview model - for testing only, not for production. Really not that complicated.

So you don't have anything to contribute beyond, and aren't interested in anything beyond, citing of terms?

Why are you in the comments section of a engineering news site?

(note: beyond your, excuse me while I'm direct now, boorish know-nothing reply, the terms you are citing have nothing to do with the thing people are actually discussing around you, despite your best efforts. It doesn't say "we might swap in a new service, congrats!", nor does it have anything to say about that. Your legalese at most describes why they'd pull 05-06, not forward 05-06 to 06-05. This is a novel idea.)

This case was simply a matter of people not understanding the terms of service. There is nothing more to be said. It's that simple. The "engineers" should know that before deploying to prod. Basic competence.

And I mean I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to say. Couldn't parse it.

John, do you understand that the thing you're quoting says "We reserve the right to pull things", not "We reserve the right to swap in a new service"?

Do you understand that even if it did say that, that wasn't true either? It was some weird undocumentable half-beast?

I have exactly your attitude about their cavalier use of preview for all things Gemini, and even people's use of the preview models.

But I've also been on this site for 15 years and am a bit wow'd by your interlocution style here -- it's quite rare to see someone flip "the 3P provider swapped the service on us!" into "well they said they could turn it off, of course you should expect it to be swapped for the first time ever!" insert dull sneer about the quality of other engineers

How is this so hard to understand? It's a preview service for testing only, not intended for production.

I am done with this thread. We are going around in circles.

Well, no. Well, sure. You're done, but we're not going in circles. It'd just do too much damage to you to have to answer the simple question "Where does the legalese say they can swap in a new service?", so you have to pretend this is circular and just all-so-confusing, de facto, we have to pretend it is confusing and/or obviously wrong to use any Gemini 2+ at all.

It's a cute argument, as I noted, I'm emotionally sympathetic to it even, it's my favorite "get off my lawn." However, I've also been on the Internet long enough to know you write back, at length, when people try anti-intellectualism and why-are-we-even-talking-about-this as interaction.

https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms

"b. Disclaimer. PRE-GA OFFERINGS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS OF ANY KIND. Pre-GA Offerings (i) may be changed, suspended or discontinued at any time without prior notice to Customer and (ii) are not covered by any SLA or Google indemnity. Except as otherwise expressly indicated in a written notice or Google documentation, (A) Pre-GA Offerings are not covered by TSS, and (B) the Data Location Section above will not apply to Pre-GA Offerings."

> And I mean I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to say. Couldn't parse it.

It’s always worth considering that this may be your problem. If you still don’t get it, the only valuable reply is one which asks a question. Also, including “it’s not that complicated” only serves to inflame.

There's a very large gulf between "what makes sense to Google" and "what makes sense to Human Beings". I have so many rants about Google's poor treatment of "customers" that they feel like Oracle to me now. Like every time I use them, I'm really just falling prey to my own misguided idea that this time I won't get screwed over.

The users aren't random "human beings" in this case. They are professional software developers who are expected to understand the basics. Deploying that model into production shows a lack of basic competence. It is clearly marked "preview" and is for test only.

That may be true, but it doesn't make the customer's claims not true. What Google did was counter-intuitive. That's a fact. Pointing at some fine print and saying "uhh actually, technically it's your stupid human brain is the problem, not us! we technically are allowed to do anything we want, just look at the fine print!!" does not make things better. We are human beings; we are flawed. That much should be obvious to any human organization. If you don't know how to make things that don't piss off human beings, the problem isn't with the humans.

If the "preview release" you were using was v0.3, and suddenly it started being v0.6 without warning, that would be insane. The only point of providing a version number is to give people an indicator of consistency. The datestamp is a version number. If they didn't want us to expect consistency, they should not have given it a version number. That's the whole point of rolling release branches, they have no version. You don't have "v2.0" of a rolling release, you just have "latest". They fucked up by giving it a datestamp.

This is an extremely old and well-known problem with software interfaces. Either you version it or you don't. If you do version it, and change it, you change the version, and give people dependent on the old version some time to upgrade. Otherwise it breaks things, and that pisses people off. The alternative is not versioning it, which is a signal that there is no consistency to be expected. Any decent software developer should have known all this.

And while I'm at it: what's with the name flip-flopping? In 2014, GCP issued a PR release explaining It was no longer using "Preview", but "Alpha" and "Beta" (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/10/new-release-pha...). But the link you showed earlier says "Alpha" and "Beta" are now deprecated. But no PR release? I guess that's our bad for not constantly reading the fine print and expecting it to revert back to something from 11 years ago.

>we'd release it as a new model with a new name

Speaking of a new name. I'll donate the API credits to run a "choose a naming scheme for AI models that isn't confusing AF" for OpenAI.

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