I'm not scratching my head about a "2025 Corolla." Windows 95 and 2000 had this built in, but then they lost it.

I'd prefer it was called Omni 2026.2 instead. It embeds a date and model and would package it as a product for on-premise or local hosting. It'd be easier to sell to the bean counters in the future: "We're running Omni 2026.2, we want to upgrade to Omni 2028."

oh well, I guess we’ll just have to take that enthusiasm and roll it over to all the open weights on providers like fireworks.ai. or others.

i’m so happy I got in early and paid for $200 a month for shit ass Opus 4.6 and sonnet 4.6 and being locked into the absolutely limited Gemini 3.8 flash.

Is being locked in to three obnoxious companies that much better?

I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them?

I already pay for the plus plan but whatever their latest model was, is locked for me. Or otherwise it's just not accessible for me.

If I try to add balance to my Google payment account, it shows me errors and is asking me to verify my identity through government documents.

---

Not to mention the extremely confusing terminology. "Flash", "Experimental". Why are most of your models either of those two? I don't get the confidence that your models are any good because of such names. Give me a normal reliable model!

Even if Google releases AGI tier models in the future, I'll always look for other models because Google clearly thinks their models are too good for any of us.

I am a Google Workspace customer by the way (have multiple accounts, actually!).

Google must really not care about me as a customer, and instead only care about the enterprise.

The only way to get the latest models with decent limits on a subsidized plan is to pay the full cost (monthly or yearly) for the pro plan or higher on a personal account.

Promo "pro" accounts and discounted "pro" accounts get much worse limits and model selection.

But at least the limits in the full plan are about the same as astra limits on the $20 oai plan.

Antigravity come with Google's models and anthropic - so Gemini 4 Argon, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-OSS 120B.

Agy is better than Claude code in some ways and vice versa.

Google models are great.

Ironically google music is so terrible I've uninstalled it and use Metrolist exclusively.

I think google models do a decent job helping me put together a blog, for example:

https://hypertekst.net

(Content is typical 90s homepage stuff, not great. But model voice isn't as grating as Claude - and while it has a "look" I think it's s bit better).

It's been maybe 6 months since I last tried them in any proper fashion (other than my usual benchmark which is non-coding related), but I was so let down previously, and found it so exhausting to just figure out how to get a subscription working with them, that I really feel like I've given up.

I'm sure I'll get around to trying them. Heck, it could happen today if the mood hits, but....it does need a specific mood. The mood to get over bullshit UX and a profound disdain for the company.

YMMV

That view somewhat biased by Flash getting stuck looping in Antigravity's CLI when I asked if it could add plan usage % to the status line. Instead of "no", it first pretended agy was Claude Code and gave me a wrong answer, then resorted to trying to analyse the binary.

Their harness situation is just awful.

Love it

Google is a joke.

This boggles my ears. I've only ever found one guy I can listen to at 2x because he talks... so... slowly.

Perfect Venn Diagram.

Thanks for the links. I'm pretty sure last time I tried this I got mysterious errors and a couple of redirect loops. Maybe this time will be the one that works.

By all rights, people should be debating among Codex, Claude, and Gemini plans. They obv don't care about that mindshare but they're a big enough organization that they could carve off a marketing and dev outreach team.

On X the only Google person I follow is Richard Seroter, and he hypes Antigravity sometimes, but not the plans you need for it. No one ever talks about it.

They should be the 3rd or 4th, certainly jockeying for position with Grok/Cursor. I would never sign up for an Elon AI plan under any circumstances, and there's enough distaste for Anthropic and OpenAI to fuel a few DCs, and Google isn't even playing.

Would want assurances they won’t permaban a Gmail for a false positive for something on their LLM offering. Like the risk with Google Photos (thinking about the dad sending a doctor a photo of his son’s rash).

I find it hard to believe there aren't worse ones out there. But off the top of my head I actually can't think of any...

Quite incredible that you can say a sentence like that, while talking about something within Google(/Alphabet) that's actually an important area for them (not just some little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic it's sincere. Anyone there overseeing it should truly feel embarrassed.

Off the top of my head: workaday

Eric Schmidt even predicted the issue in How Google Works, there are "whales" who have no business staying in their role but have become so senior that they basically control entire small towns worth of people.

I imagine this is compounded by the fact that anybody who has risen to control of a fiefdom at a prestigious place at Google is surely highly intelligent, driven, and is either highly competent or at least highly adept at projecting competence. I can't imagine spectacularly obvious dunces rise to such heights at Google.

To be clear... I'm a million miles from Google and have zero inside knowledge, just speculating

Just make a judgement call. It might be completely wrong a small % of the time, which is better than being mostly wrong all of the time.

I wonder: is this still true? The impossible projects being possible part, I mean. What projects has Google done recently that would be impossible for other large tech companies like Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc to do?

My sense is this used to be sort of true, but hasn't been true for a while. And the "easy projects feel impossible" part unfortunately does seem like it's still true, at least, looking in from the outside.

There's a difference between impossible projects are possible at Google, and no one else can do the impossible. If you really want to get into it, why didn't Google do Starlink? Project Loom was the shittier, cheaper version of Starlink.

What Google's done lately though is Waymo. Other companies are doing it, but holy shit, I can call a taxi that drives itself?

Which are amazing! Argon’s insights on code review and copywriting are phenomenal, and make these hoops well worth it! But geez, it’s horrifying that we had to figure this out!

Argon also tends to write particularly warm copy and external messages - unsurprising with Google's particular access to email data and caches of writing from the early internet.

We haven't really used it to write code from scratch - generally, we're wary of these exact things, and feel like Claude continues to have good enough architectural instincts that we've doubled down into the Claude ecosystem, with mods and tooling (including a multi-agent reviewer) that accelerate our workflows.

Eventually I gave up. Anthropic/OpenAI took < 10 minutes to get things going.

Enabling the same service via Apple Developers meanwhile took me minutes and I never felt lost, confused or frustrated.

They do return their services if you search for the name of some AWS services, which is helpful.

Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.

Right. They lack no resources. Therefore, what is happening must be what they want to happen.

Eng was neutered at that large org. Product people had the "vision" and the say. A lot of product people just used our team's product as a stepping stone onto their next role and in the end it showed. I would hope Google has a better culture...but theres a good chance it doesn't.

Vertex AI existed as an ML platform before the GenAI era. DeepMind was doing it's thing in another silo. Then Gemini products came along. Then they acquired the Windsurf folks.

A smaller company would have no choice but to focus on one team and one product. Google has a Darwinian ecosystem and someone has to come along and smash teams together, clumsily refactoring the technology and user journeys.

Their employees read HN though and their VPs hear customers complain about onboarding. I hear there is an effort underway to create one unified agentic platform.

When I signed a few devs at work up for Gemini for Code I had to go into Google Cloud, jump through several different screens, assign special permissions to each dev to make it work and even when it did work...it was insanely confusing compared to every other option out there.

It's to the point where I'm better off asking Grok Bot set it up for me rather than ever deal with figuring it out again.

Their backend looks very confused too. I consume their models through OpenRouter and requests are processed randomly by AI Studio or Vertex. API key management had several entry points for a while too, with the option to query the same model with a GCP, Firebase and/or AI Studio API key.

you could pin the provider to always get one or the other

Is this true anymore? I feel like a lot of the best talent have better opportunities elsewhere where they won't get bogged down by entrenched bureaucracy. Not to mention the Google interview process and physical locations filter out a lot of talented people from even wanting to apply.

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083596911060324570?a=iif1W7...

It's been a baffling question for over a decade (or more)

This could be used as a preface for so many things.

This. There are so many hoops to jump, so many links to click, so many pages to read. I just don't know why people would even bother with it.

My guess is that some GCP's VP won the argument that Gemini must go through AI Studio. These VPs don't use their product, so they don't give a shit about UX. As for their engineers and product managers? Well, that beats me.

unfortunately, the so-called "best talent" is being hired in management, not engineering or design or UX. :-(

The effort to fix it vs. the risk seems weirdly asymmetrical. Why do all the hard things right and then trip up at the last hurdle?

No longer true. Not since Ruth Porat IBMified the compensation policy in the name of efficiency. Btw this is exactly you can't get away with underpaying tech talent - something new will come along that threatens to eat your lunch and if your team doesn't have the best people, you're finished. And you can't change employer reputation overnight.

You also have to hire for taste.

Claude used to allow editing prompts which created branches, but imo it was a much crappier version of branching versus what I could do in AI studio. Alas, Anthropic have even removed that functionality for some reason (if someone knows how to branch in Claude please lmk).

Sometimes I just want to block off all web search and sample from LLM’s knowledge only. I guess I can tell Claude to not search the web, but I prefer doing it deterministically like AI studio.

I also like that I can set a different system prompt per session, and all my system prompts get autosaved for future use.

I find it quite surprising that with all this AI, my history of sessions is still such a mess despite my efforts to keep it organized (in both AI Studio and Claude). At least Claude finally added folders, but they are still buggy (for sessions older than a few months, for example).

Flash sonnet tera

Pro Opus Sol

Argon Fable Astra

These are the (approximately) equivalent model classes between the labs

Experimental means not production, so liable to change in the near future if you decide to build on it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276792

I remember the other one though. Looks like it's still going.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(programming_language)

Search with Google, see the AI summary and the search results, realise they want more detailed info, and put that request for clarification into the AI reply and now they're off to the races on a Google AI conversation.

Now, it's questionable how "sticky" that is and latest financials revealed it was extremely unprofitable, but in terms of raw "who's using AI" it seems to be working for them.

DuckDuckGo’s equivalent feature is unfortunately too prone to hallucination, especially whatever cheap model they are using for AI summaries. Once you click in it switches to GPT Luna, which will sometimes hilariously correct the previous response.

I heard someone say on the last such thread that you can use their models thru OpenRouter, and that this is much more pleasant than trying to use them thru Google directly. Looks like it's up there already:

https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-omni-1.2-flash

https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models/gemini-omni-1.2-flash

If you're using any sort of router middle-man new models are usually easy to try.

3.8 flash and argon have been great FYI. Can't tell a difference between any of the claude models I use at work, minus actually being able to read what it writes.

So, no, it is not astroturfing.

Gemini AI Plus does exist:

https://gemini.google/subscriptions/

Option 2: A person is unfamiliar with one of Google's plans.

Which one seems more likely to you?

https://one.google.com/intl/en_ca/about/google-ai-plans/

Yeah, the newer models are not included in your $5 subscription. You can always pay for a higher tier plan if you want access. What is so shocking about that?

I completely get not offering frontier models in the lowest subscription, but not having even a small quota of their most recent flash models is just shitty. I used to be on their Pro plan, and decided to downgrade based on how little I was using it. But now? I don't use it at all, because I have moved on to PAYG open-weight models.

Google does tend to have terrible messaging/branding/etc that results in part of these problems.

When Argon first came out, it wasn't included in Antigravity/agy and I personally never saw a Google stated plan on when they would include it, and because they removed Gemini Pro when Argon was released there was a brief window where Antigravity/agy didn't support a "Pro" model at all even for people with a "Pro" subscription.

That said, I'm with you on the idea that Google is roughly on par with everyone else despite the rhetoric here on HN that makes it look like they are way behind. They do have typical Google problems with messaging/branding for their AI products, just like all their other products, but when I use Google models for personal use I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything I get when using Anthropic for work stuff.

And for context I say this all as someone who is a bit of a Google hater these days (not happy with some recent Android decisions, moved off of gmail to avoid too much Google power concentration, etc).

"How do I even pay for it?" is particularly baffling to me considering it's literally just included in their normal range of Google One subscriptions that bundle Drive/etc which have been around for years.

You pick a plan and pay for it, and sign in to whichever app you're using like Gemini chat (ChatGPT/Claude Chat) or Antigravity (Codex/Claude Code).

https://one.google.com/about/

AI Studio is the developer console (OpenAI Platform/Claude Platform). Vertex AI is the Google Cloud enterprise platform (using GPT or Claude models via AWS Bedrock/Azure AI Foundry).

Pretty much every product is a 1:1 equivalent with the same offering from OpenAI/Anthropic + Azure/AWS. Google is both a hyperscaler and an AI lab, so the venn diagram includes both the direct OpenAI/Anthropic products and what they also serve for enterprises via Azure/AWS.

I get that Google does bad stuff and isn't popular on HN which is understandable, but the specific criticisms really don't make sense. The entire AI developer/consumer space is messy and confusing but that's an industry wide complaint not specific to Google unless they should just not compete on certain verticals.

I can’t purchase any Google consumer products now, because this “family” account is now an “enterprise” and… there’s just no way. It can’t be done. No. Just… go away. Shoo…

I can’t get a YouTube “family” account.

I can’t get an Antigravity personal account.

Nothing works.

Google insists that I upgrade the be the entire organisation, or nothing.

It’s doubly stupid because like millions of people, I initial subscribed as a non-business and was forced to convert by Google!

With Microsoft, an org can mix and match E3, E5, or E7 licensing tiers on a per-user basis. Which makes sense, because not every employee is "the same"! This is just obvious if you stop and think about for more than a fraction of a second. As a random example, I work with an org in "transport". Their backoffice staff have a bunch of advanced cloud app licenses, their bus drivers do not, because their job isn't sitting in front of a PC all day!

Google. Just. Doesn't. Get. This.

It's all-or-nothing.

Upgrade the entire org, or nobody gets AI.

And to be honest, I understand the reasoning, Google Workspace is supposed to be simpler to operate in comparison to Microsoft 365, and simple means a single licencing choice.

If you're at the scale where you need to worry about mixing and matching licences, you're at the scale where you should be looking at either an enterprise contract or going through a partner, otherwise you're going to be paying list price.

It sucks for people who can handle the complexity, but also as someone who has spent far too time in Microsoft licencing conversations and contract talks, Microsoft licencing is painfully complex (some licencing is across the whole tenant, some spend is consumption based billing against Azure, some licencing is requires a minimum amount against a %age of your total M365 user base, and then don't get me started on licencing machine users or multiplexing).

Partners or resellers have no reason to exist as a part of this trivial database design concern.

It’s a category error of the highest order to assume that only “largest enterprises” want or need per-user product licensing control. If anything, it’s the smallest orgs that need to be frugal at this level of granularity.

The relatively high cost of AI subscriptions just makes this error much more obvious, impossible to ignore or pretend is “actually better somehow”.

Because, you know, everyone would rather pay $200/mo so that even their gardener and the bus driver has an “Ultra” AI subscription than spend even ten minutes in a web portal assigning that license only to the sole developer on the payroll!

For example: what is "Antigravity Entitlement"? You can buy whatever subscription (even Ultra or higher) you like and not have access to Antigravity at all. You will have to then go through some nebulous verification process which half the time is just broken. E.g. people in EU were for months blocked from verification by the Google app insisting they message a RCE number in US unreachable from EU carriers.

Then you have to consider what is the potential fallout of Google deciding you did some hacking or said to AI something politically incorrect and banning your entire account and all connected accounts.

If you have anything important on Google you need to first degoogle before considering using their AI services or you're playing with fire.

Maybe it's a b2b vs b2c thing.

So, not that easy for me (I should note im not in the USA)

Have you tried contacting payments or the related product support to ask? https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/?hl=en#topic=90175...

We do a lot to make sure credit cards work all around the world (like we kept supporting cards in India when Apple pulled out due to certain regulations). There could be some issue with your account or card. I could maybe look if you contacted me, but likely I couldn't reply at all.

Sorry to be so whiney, and I'm sure your powers over this are very limited, but google payment messes are widely known and documented and rampant, and apparently with no improvement in sight. Google is really leaving money on the table for not being more proactive with fixing these.

And investigating a single issue can sometimes find a corner case we've missed, which is why we regularly do it.

Aside from winning the Nobel prize in chemistry.

The real problem is you can't even try them with paying for them! It's been more than a week since their previous model was announced, "Gemini 4 Carbon", if there is such a thing. Even paying customers still can't use it!

This narrative seems astroturfed particularly hard on this website. Like Google's AI isnt allowed to be praised on HN.

I have been a pixel owner since the OG pixel. I am furious with how Google has killed assistant which was fast and accurate and could operate on device if I did not have internet and replaced it with Gemini in a way that forced it down my throat and removed existing functionality for something worse that I can only use for the majority of useful use cases if I allow them to train on my data and use it for ads and measurement.

Those are product decisions that they did not have to go with.

It has completely soured me on Gemini given how much they sold my current pixel 10 Pro as having the latest in on device AI capabilities.

It is to the point where I have invested substantial tokens in building alternative solutions that I sideload onto my phone via codex to replace basic things like voice interaction with home assistant.

They have dropped the ball in so many ways and not all of them are related to the actual model quality so much as product and business decisions.

> I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them?

Where does Anthropic offer Opus 5.5 for free for everyone? Or OpenAI GPT-6 Astra?

Come on, do you think I'm crazy? Google who can't read internet pages? Sheezzz ...

Why is this so difficult to figure out?

I think they are doing a terrible job with their product packaging. Like others, I also gave up with Google models long ago due to difficulty in accessing and low limits.

My gut is that this is reflective of their fragmented internal product organization around AI.

Excellent engineering and awful product.

Ah, and the Eclipse/Android Studio stable releases, that usually have bugs as if they were still preview, release candidate ones.

In other words, business as usual.

> https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/med...

Text from the first paragraph on the page says

> Today, we’re rolling out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, and making it generally available across the Gemini API and Gemini for business. Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash introduces native 15-second video creation, multi-turn conversational editing capabilities, and enhanced reference following. We have dropped the price 30% from Gemini Omni 1.1 making it available at $0.07 per second for 720p video.

Focus on this part

> We have dropped the price 30%

The text to speech audio says

> We have dropped the price 3%

they might have a composer layer which loads certain components (transparent to you) with and without authentication and mixing different backend sources.

Then they might have templating engines and frameworks.

Sometimes they just don't care but lets be honest: a few new lines are a few bytes.

But the most critical pages go through optimizers for traffic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...

Google's main source of revenue is advertising (yes, still).

This is one of paths that serve that.

Still confused? Look at what Meta is doing with end-to-end ad creation.

I'm not saying Omni makes good ads. It's all part of the toolbox.

What a great way to start.

So, to badly impersonate N-Gate, "Business Model: Uber for Getty Images"

Increasing the available range of shot lengths from 10 seconds to 15 seconds gives film makers a wider pallet of options, if the longer shots have continuity, which is the other claim here.

I'm not aware of any "one-shot", one and done, use cases that are much more compelling the clip is 15s vs 10s. But that's not relevant to many people actually using AI video models like this on a daily basis.

For B-Roll it's different. I can somewhat see the why behind that. It's just to give your brain something to look at so that you don't have a voice-only podcast.

But movies OTOH are these creative endeavors where the shots _are_ the content instead of just augmenting the content.

This won't stop the industry from still trying to use this tech like that, of course.

I mean, if you just want to claim that AI lacks soul, and its an abomination if every frame in film isn't make by a chemical process involving silver nitrate, like the good Lord intended, that's fine. But there are certainly film makers who don't share that sentiment.

I would rather expect people to use AI to drive more conventional VFX tools, as that is reproducible, can be versioned, and, most importantly, will contain true intent in aspects.

Something this simply cannot do.

My friend on Google ai plus is still stuck on gemini 3.6 flash and now they're taking away 3.1 pro from them too even though it's long obsolete, like zero regard for user interactions here

Google is just beyond me I have no idea what they're doing, and no interest in figuring it out. I use a free gemini flash model in one of my personal apps, but that's it

It has been available, since yesterday, within Google Flow. I know, because I used it yesterday. Creatives normally are using Flow or similar third party tools, not APIs or AI Studio. The claim here is that there is more character consistency, which is helpful if true. But that's not something I can see from a little work. Despite the "More Affordable" claim, it costs more, and the outputs doesn't, from my limited experience so far, seem to be significantly better. So I could only, personally, justify pulling this up when character consistency is punching me in the face. Which, to be fair, is a lot of the time, both in my experience, and the experience of other AI film makers I talk to.

This isn't for (most) coders, it hardly matters if it shows up on Flow a little earlier that Google Vids, and, perhaps, it is a little silly to act like it is a nightmare that a rollout occurs over a few days, especially the rollout prioritizes the paying creatives on the tool that are most likely to use.

It’s like the difference between me looking at a picture, describing it to you, and then you trying to form that picture in your mind. You might get close, but it will never be the picture I’m looking at. If I then ask you questions about the picture, you can’t answer any questions about any details that I didn’t describe. I believe that is exactly the information and understanding loss that an Omni model attempts to address, which doesn’t have anything to do with output.

Some models do also offer “Omni” output, but that is more like a feature of the model than what Omni models are by design I think.

Omni 1.2 is showing 18 credit cost in Flow for a six second video.

vs.

10 credits costs for a 6 second video using Omni 1.1.

I'm not sure it's in Google's interest to talk about how much cheaper the model is, while also increasing the cost in Flow.

Meanwhile I have a blast using Wan 3.0, that's what we called real character consistency.

For example check this: https://youtu.be/m7EcEne_d8Y I didn't believe ai generated video can be this good before watching it.

Google flow is such a joke comparing to seedance or mimimax h3.

I would love to make AI art films but anything I can picture in my head I know will be too over the edge for silicon value sensibilities.

Then culturally, there is enough anti-AI sentiment in the West that it seems like a waste of time to invest time and effort into video unless actually marketing to non-western people.

I'm shocked that they don't seem to be investing in agentic capabilities there at all.

Every time I'm in google docs and want to do something with AI I try Gemini only to get frustrated that basic things are completely beyond its ability. I'm better off opening Claude's extension to do the work.

I avoid gemini because it's always been trash IMHO but I am forced to use a version of it via Siri now and I don't know if it's Apple's AI incompetence (of which there is plenty) or Google's trash model that causes Siri to still be shit. The fact I don't hear Android users raving (or taking at all) about gemini on their phones makes me think the model is just bad.

They move a lot like 3d models.

Makes me consider cancelling the plan entirely.

I just don't know how video is going to make it, long-term. You have to go through so many iterations to get something with even a semblance of what you were going for. I've been making AI videos since early 2024, and while image quality and coherence has gotten better, the ability of the models to actually follow your directions precisely hasn't. I would rather have to wait 5-10 minutes for a clip that actually does what I tell it to than get something useless in 30 seconds.

* For scientific computing it constantly cuts corners and writes awful buggy code. Bugs that will flip signs, or clamp values. Then when the model (or harness..?) discovers it, rather than fixing the underlying hacks it just adds more code with ifs, cases, and deceptive tests.

* using argon on high by itself is fast enough but seems dumb. /teamwork will catch a dozen errors from High’s laziness and sloppy tendencies

* /boost and /teamwork are ridiculously slow. Much slower than Codex Ultra. And it’s not clear when to use it.

I basically lost all trust in Argon output after running verification through “/teamwork Argon High” or “Sol 6.1 Ultra”.

I’ll keep it simple there needs to be one page to buy a subscription. It should be very clear on what it provides and it should be available the day you make the announcement for the model.

Of course the output is like we'd sensor these kinds of videos into a news broadcast, people have towels on and wear bathing suits.

Funny how this presser doesn't include the price increases such as 720p 10s under 1.1 was 15 credits and now under 1.2 it's 30 credits.