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:
(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.
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://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:
Option 2: A person is unfamiliar with one of Google's plans.
Which one seems more likely to you?
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).
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 ...
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.