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Comment by stonewhite | Hacker News Reader

Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products.

They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up. Antigravity IDE cannot even have poweruser subscriptions now from Google Workspace an Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform cannot be attached to Antigravity IDE.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform has an incredibly abysmal setup process, and if I want to limit spending per-user I have to create projects per user. The fact that you cannot activate Anthropic models on it if the billing still has free credits is almost a joke.

I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions. Forced us to buy $200 subscriptions directly from Anthropic/OpenAI.

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Also a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but their stubbornness in artificially splitting their consumer and enterprise products is extremely annoying. It's pretty weird that I have access to more powerful tools when using my personal Google account compared to my corporate Google Workspace account.

As someone who's been using Workspace as a personal email account for over a decade this has been such a struggle forever. Just lots of odd limitations to feature sets all over the place.

When they swapped Google Assistant for Gemini as the default voice provider in Android Auto it was so annoying. My wife's non-work space account can get Gemini to do the normal things like play music and what not, but my Workspace one can't do much of anything at all. I can talk about nearly any random topic with it, but getting it to change the playlist, nah, can't help you there.

It's no surprise to me to see them fumble actually supporting a lot of the consumer features of Gemini into Workspace.

I'm in the same situation. But I was shocked discovering it goes both ways: many new Gemini functionalities are only accessible using a consumer account instead of a Workspace account. Also, Gemini is now the only major AI assistant with no support for MCP connectors. Instead of adding this to the core product, like ChatGPT and Claude did, somebody at Google decided that it was smarter to add this fundamental feature to a new product instead: for enterprises this is Gemini Enterprise (which is a product completely different from the Gemini app); for consumers this the new Gemini Spark agent (meaning that you can use MCP within Spark but not within a "non-agentic" chat)... It's clear to me this a symptom of Google shipping their org chart, which is a disaster from a product perspective.

i think Google would see more success if they kept the CEO and everyone at the bottom (ie. doesn't manage anyone), and fired everyone else.

Build a whole new management tree - the current people all do a terrible job.

I think almost every company would benefit from that.

I currently have a free trial AI Pro subscription that will run out next month.

If it weren't for the $10 GCP credit, I'd straight away cancel it. I don't see enough value in Gemini to justify the $20 subscription.

Similar here. I saw an email wanting the 20 bucks to continue and I outright laughed. There’s no planet on which that plan offers equivalent value to the OpenAI or Anthropic equivalents.

They might have success if they tried maybe a 12-15 dollar tier.

Maybe because they want to train on your data? Workspace AIs are not trained on your corporate data.

Microsoft’s Copilot products are a very similar situation where the enterprise and consumer (and GitHub) features only make sense if you think about the org chart. Both companies need stronger top down product thinking.

Also have a workspace as a personal email and ended up getting a personal gmail just to try out the subscriptions before I gave up.

I have multiple anthropic and OpenAI max plans. For Gemini I just use my Cursor $200 a month plan (which also gives me the ability to try grok, conductor, etc)

The entire Google Workspace division is basically Microsoft. I assume they are making a lot of money in order to support their continued disfunction.

This drove me bonkers. You can enable play music (etc) in Android Auto for workspace accounts by enabling apps in Gemini. From memory (looking at the settings now, not 100% sure of the magic steps required), but go to admin.google.com, go to 'generative ai', 'gemini app', and 'apps settings', then turn on 'other Google apps'. This lets you play music (and other things) in Android Auto.

Ah, that could be it. I saw that "Other Google apps" and didn't think that would mean Spotify, but I guess its Android Auto or Google Assistant stuff. I'll give that a try, thanks for the tip.

As an update, I enabled that setting and I'm still not able to have Gemini actually be useful for calling people or changing playlists in my car.

Workspace users have different terms of service. This is why new features always launch to consumer first.

It's literally the meme of the MS org chart pointing guns at each other.

The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package.

It's no wonder Meta has shit the bed even worse.

It's also why Google still releases actually decent, useful models despite the product being such a hilarious mess. A lot of the time Gemini models have actually been better as production LLMs as part of LLM-based production applications than OpenAI and Anthropic models when it comes to the complete cost:quality:latency:adherence picture. And they still are. We have products in prod that use Gemini because they're better than any other model at the specific task. But we wouldn't dare use it for anything coding related, or even just as productivity tool to rely on, because as a consumer product it's a joke.

> The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package.

I got a Google One plan for Gemini, but it came bundled with YT Premium lite, and that somehow made it impossible to renew YT Premium for 30 days. I suspect different teams stealing customers from each other.

Google also gave away 1 year Gemini plans with Pixel phones that either did not work at all for existing Google One users or messed up subscriptions by downgrading your account to worse plan, or making your existing paid time shorter if you been on cheaper plan or recently changee countries. Etc.

Like when you try to give Google money they try to squeeze you as much as possible.

At the same time you can get 5 time more limits for free just by registering 10 free Google accounts.

Google subscriptions are one big mess.

Exactly my experience. I'm building an AI document-extraction platform, so I had to benchmark a bunch of models — on the cost:quality:latency:adherence picture, flash wins hands down for structured extraction. (Caveat: I've only tested the three US labs and Mistral.). So like u said, totally viable in prod for a relatively static tool. Didn't build the tool suite with gemini, but if you use service mode it currently mainly runs on flash.

Haven't done any serious coding work with the flash models though — but I'm seeing more and more HN comments from people who seem to have picked it up for that in the last couple of months.

Apparently you cannot turn off using your data as training data with gemini. This is in line with Google's general privacy policies and it's seeming need to create a stasi file on every human.

You can turn it off but it's an all or nothing switch, if you turn it off everything will basically become a temporary chat and all past chats are deleted

It's absolute insanity. They have all the resources to have been able to lead from the front with this new technology. They have the products and users to integrate this technology into people's already existing lives. But they keep fumbling.

They're not even benchmarking against other models now, just against themselves - which tells you everything you need to know.

What does "leading from the front" get them?

There is absolutely no loyalty when it comes to coding. Nothing could be more common than people threating to jump ship whenever another frontier or open source model comes.

Google is clearly able to keep growing their free and consumer and small business use cases. Unlike corporate coding, we actually have evidence that solo and small businesses can actually see productivity gains.

Anthropic and OpenAI need to stay dancing like mad, because it's their source revenue which underpins their investments.

Why does Google need to shove something at the top at the same desperate cadence? Other than "recursive self improvement leads to AGI" it seems perfectly fine if they push out something dramatically better every year and half.

Unfortunately them giving up coding means they have less traces to train on.

They simply don't have the leadership to lead. And it starts from the top.

Google promotes people based on shipping features, not making good software. So this breakage means someone is shipping features.

You should be happy for them.

> Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success

This is still very early days. Who is "on top" has flipped back and forth many times already. The next frontier model release (from whomever) will change things again.

I don't think that's true if the reason a company has left the vendor for given model by making it hard to buy. Enterprise IT is enough of a pain in the butt that people will forego the new shiny to avoid the old painful unless it's genuinely better. As you say though, the best frontier model flips regularly, so companies won't go through the hassle of deploying a model if it's proved horrible to do in the past. They'll just skip that model because their current one is fine.

I don't think it's that early tbh, agentic coding has ~90% adoption in the US.

Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out. The benchmarks change, but almost nobody opts to use anything other than Claude IME when I ask them. Enterprise is more competitive since they care about costs and other things, but developers leaning towards Claude puts a thumb on the scales there.

The product doesn't have much lock in, so it is possible to dislodge Claude, and Anthropic could (and some may argue is likely to) just shoot themselves in the foot again and again and again, but Google has never been particularly good at enterprise sales, and they have never actually been at the frontier of intelligence.

I think Google's incentives have mostly about building models for their products, which makes them focus more on the cheap end, and while they need that, it feels like the Innovator's Dilemma is biting them here.

I own a lot of Google stock from working there in the past and have been quite happy about their trajectory up until the last 6 months, but I am getting pretty antsy about their AI story these days.

> Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out.

Claude Code's success is not due to the agent but because the model is considered the best for programming and is very heavily subsidized, compared to pay as you go API prices. Consumers and Enterprise are not really locked in and will go where it makes the most sense.

I think they have almost no loyalty by actual developers.

There is no reason to be loyal....There is no moat.

Basically you may choose to drink brand A water bottle, brand B water bottle or tap water. Oh and you might choose the glass water bottle if you use API/Fable.

There’s no reason to be loyal, but I guess it’s a bit like any tool, once you get used to how one works why would you change to another? There is some stickiness with an LLM + harness.

Exactly developers can switch to another coding cli and the learning curve is close to zero. Mindshare without switching costs is just a popsicle in the sun.

Every model has its strengths and weaknesses, being loyal is suboptimal unless you mean being loyal to all of them, which is why cursor would have been well positioned before it got acquired. Now you have to jump through hoops to call Gemini from Claude from codex. Yuck.

Claude code was one of the first agentic code tool and when openai release models similar in performance they didn't do as well in their tools (now codex)

Claude Code (or any other model/infra/harness co-design) is not subsidized in any normal use of that word. It's trough filling (I've written this up in lurid detail so I'm only going to do it again if anyone cares).

It's not true, it's just a play for margin.

This isn't a perfect survey, but I am a Codex user and most of my employees are pretty stuck in their workflows and were not really interested in trying even when I was saying good things (even pre-Opus 4.8).

When we work trial people, 100% of people ask for Claude rather than Codex or anything else.

When I talk to people at non-AI tech events everyone basically says they use Claude and have not tried an alternative.

Developers writ large are actually not that interested in trying multiple tools, they like customizing their chosen tool and tweaking it forever.

I think developers are as susceptible to brand marketing as everyone else. It's why almost everyone has a Macbook.

Nah, these harnesses like Claude Code and Codex are very sticky, I don't see many coworkers switching often, as they have set workflows for their particular harness. It's like vim and emacs, once you pick one it's unlikely you'd switch especially as the models are all "good enough" by now.

> I don't think it's that early tbh, agentic coding has ~90% adoption in the US.

Where does that 90% figure come from?

I pulled it out of my ass based on anecdotes of talking to engineers and customers, but actual surveys back this up as well with numbers from 84-91%: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-coding-adoption-stati...

Model quality is only one aspect, the bigger problem is making it work in a fully integrated enterprise platform, and Google has always been lacking when it came to the latter.

At this rate, if Google has a flagship model, you're better off plugging it into a competitor's tooling than hope Google figures out how to use it.

Early days or not, Google fucking deleted my IDE and wiped my settings. It took them days to roll out a fix, by which point I had migrated off Antigravity.

I guess? Maybe I'm alone here but I don't feel like Fable is particularly more useful than Sonnet most of the time. I feel like the LLMs are good enough for the majority of uses and the hyper expensive premium ones are way into diminishing returns. At this point with Kimi being as good as it is, if they jack up the price any more I'll just go open source.

Google Gemini agy is not allowing you to use your token via your own harness. My own harness is far more efficient than agy. They can take a simple stance - if you exceed your token limit they block you - with the 5 hr limit they are already doing this . so there should be no reason to block you from using your own harness - if you are more efficient - you gain - if you are less you lose .

They are not allowing me to hit their endpoints which agy hits - it's frustrating . i tried to hack it with gemini itself. what i love about gemini is it's so encouraging and ready to help you - even against the agy client : ) .

Even though im so frustrated with this - i still love Gemini for some reason ! Most encouraging model in the world!

Aren’t the subscriptions extremely subsidized and burning cash for Anthropic and OpenAI? A reasonable explanation is they’re simply abstaining from the war of attrition, especially given cheaper comparable models are breaking the illusion that the “frontier of intelligence” has any kind of per token margin.

Makes sense, subsidizing tokens doesn’t seem like a great strategy for a public company.

And Google alway has a target on its back for antitrust (regardless of claim validity)

This is hotly debated and completely unclear. Let's say Anthropics Opus models cost the same to serve as GLM 5.2. GLM 5.2 is 4.4$/MTok while Opus is 5.6 times more expensive. Assume that GLM 5.2 is served at essentially zero margin. Then Anthropic has >80% margin on API pricing. So even if an average person with a subscription pays only 20% of the API price of their usage, Anthropic makes money on subscriptions.

And the real numbers could be better for Anthropic. It's feasible Opus models are actually cheaper to serve than GLM 5.2 because Anthropic have optimized the hell out of inference.

Sure, but then why wouldn’t I use GLM 5.2 at cost or K3?

I guess that’s the big question, will people pay a big margin long term to use their end products / models or will AI tokens be commoditized by many competing players. For coding if I had to pay API costs I’d switch in a heartbeat, enterprise maybe more reluctant?

Enterprise contracts with American companies over foreign ones. Enterprise is where OpenAI and Anthropic make most of the money.

I know many, many engineers who are paying something like 2-5% (via subscription) of what their usage would cost if billed by API tokens.

I know some down to about 1% ($200 Max plan vs $20k in tokens per month)

And I know many people that don't. That have a 20 or 100 dollar subscription for very bursty workflows with months where they barely use tokens.

Not every subscriber is a full time SWE. In fact most professional SWEs will be on enterprise plans and thus not get subscriptions at all.

I think it's very plausible that subscriptions are overall losing money. But we simply don't know.

Claude Code has enterprise subscriptions. No $200 max plan but you can buy $100 premium seats.

(and if you are using per-token billing as an enterprise user without first maxing out a premium seat you are very silly)

Not true. These seats are being phased out. Enterprise is now token only.

Possibly, but aren't the tech giants positioned to win a war of attrition? Then again, they're more likely to sit on that cash and wait for the opportune time to buy a frontier lab.

The subsidizing thing is repeated over and over without proof. Personally, I doubt they're actually subsidized.

they're subsidized if you max them out, i'd imagine most users are paying $20 for maybe $2-5 of tokens.

anthropic probably has more customers that use more of their sub, but for open ai where a lot of their subs are consumers through chatgpt.com, they have a lot of free money to work with there

I think the subscriptions pay them back in spades because the same dev who maxes out their subscription on their personal account transfers that exact behaviour over to their enterprise work and - guess what - it's all billed per token there. This is a large reason why corporates are reeling from the cost right now, I think.

i've got to wonder how much of this is intentional, and how much of this is just google being their usual terrible selves at anything consumer-product related.

Google's biggest and most important customer for all this AI stuff is google. Do they actually want other customers, or is having other people use their AI just an annoyance at this point, where we use up compute that they'd rather use internally...

> google being their usual terrible selves at anything consumer-product related

And yet millions of people around the world are using their stuff, very often using only their stuff.

> I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions.

Likewise. This seems like a common feel. I have at least spent $4000 and likely a lot more on Gemini API because I really wanted them to win. I gave up.

I am going to ask a very direct question and only because I am curious.

Why do you care? Why would you spend your own money to a multi trillion dollar company so that they win their own "war" against another multi trillion dollar company?

Please don't get me wrong, I know the question can seem a bit negative, I am really just curious.

No, it's a fair question. The answer: I believe(d) in Demis Hassabis's vision of AI

Although, I think saying 'wanted them to win' was not accurate. More like, I stuck with them hoping it will get better, and it did get better in many ways, coding was not one of them.

This was exactly my thought process. Coupled with a less idealistic one: mid 2025 if you looked arena ELO scores google seemed to be dominating and I was sure the trend would continue. But they really dropped the ball on coding and tool use.

That being said, controlling android and apple mobile devices is kind of a big deal. And their video models are still top notch.

I trust Google to:

* Abruptly ban me and all users from a Google Workspace for no reason whatsoever.

* Abruptly shut down a service.

I'll never give Google my direct money.

Life gets simpler and better as soon as you stop giving money to Google.

It’s so silly that individual people still use their shit. Corporations, I understand - they always choose the most mediocre stacks and tools by default. But why people choose to bring the mediocrity of Google into their lives is beyond me.

> But why people choose to bring the mediocrity of Google into their lives is beyond me.

Because life gets simpler and better if you are just using what is available on your phone and in your browser instead of constantly chasing current HN darling.

That’s one braindead strawman. There’s millions of apps to choose from on your phone. Alternatives to Google are decades old. But do enjoy getting your ass profiled in gmail and let me know if the ads in your mailbox are helpfully tailored to your needs and preferences!

> There’s millions of apps to choose from on your phone

And choosing one of them obviously makes life more complicated than not doing that.

> getting your ass profiled

Gmail knows nothing of my ass.

> let me know if the ads in your mailbox are helpfully tailored to your needs and preferences!

I couldn't, for I don't check them. I have enough life to live without degoogling crusade.

> they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions

This is what happens when you put a McKinsey consultant in the role of CEO of an organization where product managers run the asylum instead of engineers.

They'll probably be back later. It's very possible they are "saving up" for a much bigger run.

More likely an acquisition.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is the specialty of product managers.

+1 same way vscode killed its usage base and gave it to its fork - cursor

I don't know where you've been for the last decade but all google ever does is retire products with no recourse.

It's funny that they triggered the infamous "Code Red" moment in OpenAI when the 3-3.1 models came out. I switched to using them for a lot of single-shot LLM calls because they were fast and cheap. Their only area that they were lacking in was agentic/tool calling.

Needless to say 3.5 was a disappointment. Curious to see 3.6.

> Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products.

HN lives in a bubble.

I have German/Italian/Polish clients virtually all use Gemini and NotebookLM. Talking insurance, banking, consulting, legal.

The real world doesn't look at pointless benchmarks on writing react tailwind crap, they are already google suite users, get the tools, test them and adopt them, end of story.

It's going to be like with angular, never mentioned on the net, widely used in the real world.

I have friends and family who use Gemini, but entirely because their Pixel phones came with a year of it for free. No other reason, and they will most likely never pay for it.

Yup, it is often mind-boggling how people here are detached from reality. Millions of people around the world rely on Google services, Gemini in all probability is the most used model consumer-wise, Google receives unimaginable stream of data on even smallest habits common people have etc.

But hey, Gemini makes shittier job than Fable at producing my shitty "app" no one cares about. It is so over for Google!

They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up

That sounds awful.

For those of us who don't follow the AI hype cycle, what does that have to do with the topic of this thread: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber?

From the posted link: "3.6 Flash: Our workhorse model that delivers better coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance."

What is Google's recently released AI coding product?

That's kinda like asking why someone might complain about Chrome's memory usage in a thread about a new version of V8.

You don't see what Google phasing out an AI product subscription has to do with a Google AI product release?

"Your new models are great, but uh... How exactly am I supposed to use them?"

That is, given a lot of users' contexts, the way they can and the way they want to use these models are increasingly disjoint.

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