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Comment by revolvingthrow | Hacker News Reader

People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?

I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.

I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.

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Interesting. I have the Google AI Pro plan and use Gemini several times each day and I don't remember the last time I got a refusal. I wonder what criteria go into that, like maybe how they rate your Google account?

If I type your first query into Gemini, it immediately spits out a long and plausible answer.

What exactly are you saying it's refusing? Can you give a screenshot or example?

I've always found all versions of gemini to be (for a lack of a better word) lazy.

I guess it's economic wrt. token use, but it often either refused for absurd safety reasons, or other weird stuff like responding that an LLM like itself wasn't a suitable tool for the job, and very quickly gives up.

Claude is on the other end of the spectrum, which makes it more noticeable when switching between them.

I love antigravity. I’ve had zero issues with it.

The context window size is also very small if you use Gemini in the app. It starts forget quite fast. In my opinion Gemini on app is useless additionally to the guardrails.

> People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?

They are quite insane. I was asking it to list candidates metal parts I could buy at a hardware store to add weight to 3D prints: stuff like angle brackets etc.

I wanted to know, bang for bucks, and ease of insertion (at print time) / modelling in a 3D model.

Complete refusal as if I was a terrorist building a bomb.

Then there are the weird refusals that then are OK after all if you insist by asking it what's wrong about it:

"How should I cook eggs?"

"I'm sorry but I can't help you with that" (it formulates it differently but that's the idea)

"What, I'm just hungry, is explaining me how to cook eggs really against your rules?"

And then it answers "No of course not, here's how to do it:..."

Really strange stuff.

This is indeed strange. Do you get the same results if you disable personalisation using the top right button ("temporary chat")? Can you please share a trace?

I just asked gemini the question with sim number and it gives me full step by step guide.

Are you outside the US?

I'm outside the US, use Gemini models quite a bit, and I've never run into any refusals of any kind. I'm using them for a fairly wide range of things, I'm sure at least as risqué as asking how to transfer a sim. As a matter of fact I actually asked it's advice on how to transfer banking apps and auth apps from one phone about 3 weeks ago and got decent answers.

It's more dependent on the specific country they are in (and I don't know the specifics). But Google is large enough to have lawyers for every country, and Google is in a never ending whirlwind of national lawsuits/fines, so you end up at the mercy of whatever the lawyers for your country think will not piss off regulators. The EU (and individual states) have pretty heavy AI regulations, and Google even just got fined for an AI overview being incorrect.

It also could just be which way the wind was blowing for OP, the models are stochastic to some degree, but there is no shortage of complaints from (mostly euro) users getting stonewalled.

I've seen similar refusals on X from Claude from users in Germany when the LLM assumed the users are asking for something forbidden about certain topics.

Ultimately I think that in 10 years time, this is what's gonna kill paid consumer LLMs, and boost the usage of Chinese LLMs self hosted at home an your own hardware that people will torrent via VPNs, as they will also be banned because of "disinformation and misinformation".

So the end winners will be the hardware companies that will sell AI chips to consumers after the datacenter bubble pops. Unless of course the EU will ban the sale of AI chips that don't have some limitations baked in on which models you're allowed to run (the state approved ones). Interesting times ahead. I think in 10-20 years time we'll look back at present day LLMs the way we look back at the open internet of the 90's-00's.

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