It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI.
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.
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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.
AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet. For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it. Give nearly anyone else a few hours alone with that codebase and Opus-5.5 and it will be looking 1,000x better.
> "AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet."
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 random little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic, it's sincere!
Everyone there overseeing it (from direct management all the way up to C-suite) should truly feel embarrassed.
I wanted to pay them money to try their things. I just literally couldn't figure out how to do it. I think I then managed to get some trial credits but I never managed to activate anything with them and hit API limit after basically one prompt.
I enjoy the level of control AI studio gives me, especially over the context. I can easily branch a conversation into new sessions from anywhere, delete any message, and explicitly turn on/off web search.
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).
Yeah Tibo has a tweet where he talks about how he tried to do stuff at Google and they just wouldn't let him. Doesn't matter how much $ and talent you have if you are actively sandbagging them (and of course, for truly great stuff, you want the whole org from the very top driving you on, a la Musk or Jobs).
> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience
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.
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.
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.
> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet
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.
No longer true. Not since CFO 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 reverse reputation erosion overnight - part of the attractiveness of taking a high-paying job is that everyone knows you're being paid high.
Agreed. One genuine question I have is: how is this not a five alarm fire at Google? What are the set of constraints that have made this unable to be solved?
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?
Google has an near monopoly on Internet ads (or rather a duo-poly combined with Facebook). Having such an monopoly makes them have hindsights on what they are doing and how they are failing, or even if they do, the incentives and management just aren't cleanly aligned with what ought to be the case.
I love when my kid and and I are using AI Studio to make tower defense games, and it tries to squeeze in reasons to make Gemini API calls. No, I don't want a Gemini-populated random news ticker in my tower defense game.
If you have ever worked for a large company you can quickly imagine why they cant execute. Google is old now and entrenched. We will see how long it takes them to become IBM/GE etc. (if they are not already headed that direction).
Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.
People really seem to struggle with this and I can't figure out why... Like it kind of just reads like astroturfing in every thread. I downloaded agy, purchased a subscription that the splash page said "includes Argon" and it... works?
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.
I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash. In consequence, I never use Gemini anymore, and instead have a PAYG plan on Deep Infra.
Yep, seriously. We live in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic each have about 60 different products named with variations of "Codex"/"ChatGPT" or "Claude", on top of a model matrix of about 100 different choices of name/version/reasoning level/variant. But somehow Google's comparatively streamlined offerings are impossibly confusing for HN to understand.
"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.
There have been months where we've paid 1500€ for my AI models, but I can't bother with Google's models because I literally don't know how to get them. Every time I look it up it looks incredibly cumbersome and confusing. It's not clear which models I get, if I can get them on my personal accounts or need the work account. It's just too confusing.
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.
I'm quite happy using antigravity fwiw. I use Claude code for work. Only tried agy because I was already paying for Google one (youtube music, youtube without ads/premium and a few TB of storage).
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:
The only sane way is to do it through openrouter. I spent hours trying to figure out how to use one of their two competing APIs that expose the models natively, it ended up being a waste of time.
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).
It's confusing for enterprises, too. Believe it or not, the cloud sales team recommends hiring partners to set up basic auth and "landing zones" for the APIs.
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.
Omni is a video editing model, and flash implies it's a lighter weight one than what they have/could have. The other labs don't have competing models here.
What's Carbon then? I haven't been paying much attention to Google but their naming has been confusing me.
Luna/Terra/Sol/Astra was a bit pretentious but at least the sizing makes sense. (I imagined the meeting... "Ok guys, we're getting mogged on naming... what's more epic than a Myth?" -"The SUN!")
Anthropic makes sense with the literary "scale" naming, mostly.
Is a Carbon bigger than an Argon though? Maybe it has to do with the atomic number?
That's one take. Gemini free mode is my default LLM app on phone. Their conversational AI is really good. They're still the leader in search results which makes Gemini responses really good. And, it's also really fast. I still only pay Anthropic but Gemini is seriously good, and free.
Counter point: you have to sign your life away to use it
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.
Its weird how with every gemini release there's a top comment like this. Gemini models are really good, and all companies have internal models they dont let the public have access too, they just dont tell us about them.
This narrative seems astroturfed particularly hard on this website. Like Google's AI isnt allowed to be praised on HN.
yep they need to improve their harness and their ai ecosystem and make it simpler. They have great ai system but the data retention policy is very bad if you turn it off you lose all of your previous chat data. They need to think from the point of customers nit only profits.
This sentiment is the top comment I'm seeing on every recent Google release. That it's impossible to actually access the tech, or even pay for it.
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:
I just use their models via openrouter. I have an account with OpenAI, Ollama , even deepseek platform. But for all google ai stuff, I just use openrouter.
Not only is it easy to pay but I also don’t risk getting my account banned.
100% this.
I have genuinely tried to use Gemini models - tried to pay for them, but its practically impossible to navigate Google Cloud (vertex, antigravity, etc)console to even find where to pay - after great meat proxy efforts, I fix billing issues (or I think I fix them) the model stops working suddenly. Its shocking how bad Google AI has been
I paid, ran antigravity cli, getting 500 on the image tool because the model the cli wants to use is not available?
There are no other models to choose. Im so confused
That, and gemini (app or web) has been bugging for months for me. I'd get "something wrong happened" every 3-4 queries, sometimes a few retries made it work, sometimes not. That this happens for a day is understandable, that this is unsolved after weeks or months is incomprehensible to me and literally forced me to a competitor (which I immediately found to be better anyway)
I mentioned to an Antigravity dev at an event that I am not likely to try their models if I am forced to use their harness as Antigravity isn't a super great harness so even if they release a good model I'm forced to (if I want to use subscription) to also use their bad harness.
I agree and I'm guessing the reason is that Google's real incentive is using their own AI in search and their internal products. While they should care about other developers building on top of them (via Google Cloud), they have an even bigger customer which is their internal teams.
They may have dropped the ball on AI-for-programmers, but the Google slopbot is the one the normies use. As much as their AI summaries used to be the biggest joke in the industry, today they're the one I think normies who aren't "AI people" are using the most day-to-day. I see a lot of people doing it:
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.
Bingo, this is exactly how I use AI personally. There’s just too much SEO spam to wade through on search results anymore, and Google’s AI Mode RAG is pretty good at citing trustworthy sources when I want to dive in.
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.
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!
Alphabet is a company with too much money and resources, which means they don't end up trying very hard to acquire and retain customers for any of these products since it's just a blip in their overall revenue. It's time to split them up.
I can't use it. The webpage reloads continuously after logging in. It's probably some ad blocker add-on, but it's the only web AI that doesn't work, so I simply don't use it at all.
At some point they will find a good enough model to replace google search completely and then everyone will use them. They just need to figure out the monetization
yes, it is so difficult and frustrating even i want to pay google to use their AI. But I don't think Google employees are this incompetent. They are probably doing this to turn customers away because they don't have enough compute ? Anyway, I am selling all my Google stocks.
On top of that, the inference is painfully slow. I’m now convinced Gemini is no better than ChatGPT or Claude. They haven’t even managed fast responses on the Flash model, and I’m paying for Pro. Gemini, you suck.
The most annoying thing with Gemini: you give it a url, and ask it a question about it, then it replies with something like: "I wasn't able to access the website you shared (url) directly. Based on information from similar webpages ... blah blah"
Come on, do you think I'm crazy? Google who can't read internet pages? Sheezzz ...
It truly is. I acutallu signed up for an annual plan because I used the image models for design ideas on my house. Few weeks ago they announced changes, no more pro models. It’s laughable how much they keep screwing up.
AI is a threat to Google's main business of advertising (primarily through search). They're on the AI bandwagon because otherwise their stock price will plummet but they're secretly hoping the AI bubble will pop and they can go back to showing ads full time.
This is a new video model. It is not a replacement for Gemini 4, it is doing something altogether different.
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.
To my understanding it has nothing to do with output and entirely to do with the understanding of the input together as basically one input stream. An LLM with a vision encoder or audio encoder takes the media and turns them into tokens the LLM reads and then turns into its text latents (basically).
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.
It shows me that single prompt costs 30 credits. Also shows that 50 credits refresh daily, so I can make 1 video per day for free. I did one, with 20 credits remaining.
I goes straight to try it on Flow, genarate some motocycle riding scene. The character consistency improvement is neglegible but my bike is moving in reverse...wait. These flash model never inspired trust or anything.
Meanwhile I have a blast using Wan 3.0, that's what we called real character consistency.
The rollout is so confusing. Going straight to the Gemini app and asking when I can use this model gets me vague and contradicting answers. Ultimately it sounds like the Vids rollout will take 1-3 days, and you can go to vids.new on desktop to see if you’ve won the lottery and have it available now, apparently on any free Google account. Business accounts can use it too. Meanwhile the Gemini app is getting it on paid plans, but with different video length limits and no clear rollout timeline. If you pay for the API, it’s available now apparently.
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.
I’m still afraid to use Google models because my gmail (which my life kinda depends on) is connected to it and I’m afraid of getting blocked or sth because of some weird prompt.
Completely random, but I was inspecting the source code for their Omni 1.2 Flash web page, and there are insane amount of newlines. There are seven newlines between the first line and the DOCTYPE. There are huge amount of newlines between each section. What did they use to generate this website?
Enterprise websites tend to have very complicated content generation systems with little care about performance (including html/css/js size). What's hypocritical is that Google penalizes in SERP sites which have poor performance score yet Google's own sites are far from exemplary.
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
What's this name and versioning now, NOBODY understands Google's Ai products, including subscribers to them.
Why their models go from 3 to 4 but then whatever this is starts at 1 I honestly don't care anymore
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
honestly the naming on all of them from all companies is weird unless you 'know where to look'. I get having a cool code name for each one. But give me a clear way to look at it and see why should I use one model over another? like 'low/medium/high' something?! please!
Yeah, it would be nice if there was some standardized naming. You'd think these AI companies would benefit if users actually knew which models were the fast ones and which models were the more capable ones. It's easy for the layman to get bad output and come to the wrong conclusion, writing off an entire brand.
Maybe it's because I'm more in the Anthropic ecosystem, but I find their naming convention pretty straight forward. I've given up trying to follow OpenAI, but they have a version number that goes up and sometimes they call one of them "cyber" so you know it's I guess extra good at red teaming?
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
I desperately wish Google would focus on improving the Gemini capabilities that are built-in to their office suite (docs, slides, etc.). The current built-in Gemini is terrible, and if I could use e.g. Claude natively with those products my workday would be an order of magnitude more productive.
I'm shocked that they don't seem to be investing in agentic capabilities there at all.
I built https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs basically for this. It lets any agent you want create rich documents - word, slides, spreadsheets, mermaid diagrams, rich code rendering, etc. About to launch a cloud first version of it, so what's on the site now will evolve soon.
Despite basically reinventing the rulebook for modern office products Google still seems the least interested to do anything innovative or progressive with it.
Claude (and ChatGPT) has pretty good browser plugins that I use for integration with Google Docs. Between that when I am editing something on the tab and the mcp that lets it load files for context in chat I haven’t seen any blockers to my workflows, might be worth checking out.
Gemini in Google Docs products is embarrassingly bad. Like Microsoft Copilot-levels of "shove AI into everything even if it's dumber or more limited than than GPT-3".
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.
Instead they fire the person that made Google Workspace CLI and focus on things that are flashy for demos. You can generate a cat balancing on a ball into your Slide if you want!
When playback ends on one of the videos, the page jumps back to that video for some reason. I saw this too when I had multiple videos playing at once and the earlier clip on the page finished while watching another one lower on the page.
Still can't handle the prompts I throw at it, though the 15 seconds gives more breathing room. Not being able to use first and last frames for the longer videos doesn't render it useless, but it gets pretty close (the model just cannot reproduce unusual or idiosyncratic character designs without first and last frames; fat, muscular, ugly, and non-human characters regress to tv commercial blandness).
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.
> 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.
It's amazing to me how poor adoption has been for video models, at least in my corner of the internet. I see considerably more Code to Video content from libraries like HyperFrames than any native AI video. It seems that users are much more open to AI coded "Explained style" videos than anything else.
The irony too is how much less censored the Chinese models are.
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.
It's still pretty inconsistent, slow, and expensive. I have claude write up massive prompts with reference images and it'll still come out poorly, but since I'm not generating much revenue with the product I use these models for, I just accept a lot of the sloppiness. I have tried a lot of different prompts, I think video just has a lot more free space to differ from our mental models than something like code that is a lot more well-defined.
That is sad... I tried to guess and ignore AI videos (created to be deliberately misleading as "realistic") by length, but I guess that time is over now.
Huh, the latest model just one-shot through my private cultural sensitivity test. In the past they got stuck into the nudity filters and you really had to assure the models that no, this is normal in Finland.
The latest Veo models one-shot the male models, but needed extra coaxing for them to allow women to appear in the videos.
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.
Okay, I just wanted to vent: I'm on the Pro plan and I've not been able to use Argon for the past 4 days - every time I send a prompt I get downgraded to a Flash model.
Not going to even read this post. While I have been really bullish on Google I am now tired of them constantly baiting us with vaporware announcements unfortunately.
TFA is literally a marketing piece for why someone might want to use it. If you personally don't need it, that's ok, you're just not their target audience.
Hot take, Google should focus on their open weight models. I use Qwen 3.8 and it’s been amazing. I would pay for Max but there’s no provider or server here in the states. If they had an amazing Gemma 5, I would seriously consider trying their closed source models. Model comfort and familiarity is a real thing.
It would be incredibly helpful to me if AI model names followed cars.
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."
They aren't far from cars. Cars have generations and each generation has distinct models, for market (region), body style, maybe generational steps with facelift, etc. So your "2005 Corolla" is Corolla Gen9 (2000-2007), designated E120/E130 (no idea how they differ), and can be 3-door/5-door hatchbacks, 4-door sedan, station wagon, varying which market you look at.
But it still starts with “Gemini”. It would be better if they called it Gemini Omni 4, 4.1 etc. Otherwise call it just Omni 1.2 and drop the Gemini prefix.
Why cant I add a MCP server to any of the Google AI products unless I subscribe to https://business.gemini.google/ . This is like selling a laptop with out a USB port.
Maybe I’m using antigravity wrong, so I’d love to be corrected here:
* 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”.
The average length of a shot in full length feature film today is like three seconds. Even back in the old days, the average shot was like 12 seconds. Most movies are made up sequences and scenes made up of lots and lots of shots.
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.
That's cool, but I don't see why one would want to watch a movie like that.
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.
Plenty of things. I am using it to create a dataset of fatigued drivers for the company I work. It keeps the starting frame / angle really well and is the best I tried so far. We are building a fatigue detection model for safety.
it’s a shame that Google/Gemini decided to restrict and fuck other adventurous yet extremely gracious paying customers; who were excited at the prospect of not being locked in to two obnoxious companies.
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.
It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI.
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.
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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.
AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet. For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it. Give nearly anyone else a few hours alone with that codebase and Opus-5.5 and it will be looking 1,000x better.
> "AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet."
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 random little side project), and yet it isn't hyperbolic, it's sincere!
Everyone there overseeing it (from direct management all the way up to C-suite) should truly feel embarrassed.
I wanted to pay them money to try their things. I just literally couldn't figure out how to do it. I think I then managed to get some trial credits but I never managed to activate anything with them and hit API limit after basically one prompt.
I enjoy the level of control AI studio gives me, especially over the context. I can easily branch a conversation into new sessions from anywhere, delete any message, and explicitly turn on/off web search.
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).
Yeah Tibo has a tweet where he talks about how he tried to do stuff at Google and they just wouldn't let him. Doesn't matter how much $ and talent you have if you are actively sandbagging them (and of course, for truly great stuff, you want the whole org from the very top driving you on, a la Musk or Jobs).
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2083596911060324570?a=iif1W7...
> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience
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.
Agreed.
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.
> the ability to hire the best talent
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.
> AI Studio is legitimately the worst UX experience on the internet
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.
>the ability to hire the best talent
No longer true. Not since CFO 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 reverse reputation erosion overnight - part of the attractiveness of taking a high-paying job is that everyone knows you're being paid high.
Agreed. One genuine question I have is: how is this not a five alarm fire at Google? What are the set of constraints that have made this unable to be solved?
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?
Google has an near monopoly on Internet ads (or rather a duo-poly combined with Facebook). Having such an monopoly makes them have hindsights on what they are doing and how they are failing, or even if they do, the incentives and management just aren't cleanly aligned with what ought to be the case.
I love when my kid and and I are using AI Studio to make tower defense games, and it tries to squeeze in reasons to make Gemini API calls. No, I don't want a Gemini-populated random news ticker in my tower defense game.
Ironically, Gemini is excellent with UI/UX, and somehow they can't use it to improve themselves.
>For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent
Right. They lack no resources. Therefore, what is happening must be what they want to happen.
If you have ever worked for a large company you can quickly imagine why they cant execute. Google is old now and entrenched. We will see how long it takes them to become IBM/GE etc. (if they are not already headed that direction).
Do they still have 5 messaging apps or did they finally trim it down.
> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it.
You also have to hire for taste.
They're banned from using Opus-5.5 or other competitor models so they can't fix it.
> and the ability to hire the best talent
unfortunately, the so-called "best talent" is being hired in management, not engineering or design or UX. :-(
> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent
This could be used as a preface for so many things.
What's wrong with it? I haven't used it, just curious to hear its faults
What about Workday? That's the standard in terms of horrible experience.
> For a company with unlimited cash and the ability to hire the best talent, I just don’t get it
It's been a baffling question for over a decade (or more)
People really seem to struggle with this and I can't figure out why... Like it kind of just reads like astroturfing in every thread. I downloaded agy, purchased a subscription that the splash page said "includes Argon" and it... works?
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.
They (Google) didn't accept my CC. AWS does, Claude does, OpenAI does. Meta/Muse didn't. Kimi did.
So, not that easy for me (I should note im not in the USA)
I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash. In consequence, I never use Gemini anymore, and instead have a PAYG plan on Deep Infra.
So, no, it is not astroturfing.
It honestly does feel like astroturfing. I use Gemini models across a range of client and personal projects, in AI Studio and GCP and they just work.
Maybe it's a b2b vs b2c thing.
Yep, seriously. We live in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic each have about 60 different products named with variations of "Codex"/"ChatGPT" or "Claude", on top of a model matrix of about 100 different choices of name/version/reasoning level/variant. But somehow Google's comparatively streamlined offerings are impossibly confusing for HN to understand.
"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.
There have been months where we've paid 1500€ for my AI models, but I can't bother with Google's models because I literally don't know how to get them. Every time I look it up it looks incredibly cumbersome and confusing. It's not clear which models I get, if I can get them on my personal accounts or need the work account. It's just too confusing.
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.
I'm quite happy using antigravity fwiw. I use Claude code for work. Only tried agy because I was already paying for Google one (youtube music, youtube without ads/premium and a few TB of storage).
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).
The only sane way is to do it through openrouter. I spent hours trying to figure out how to use one of their two competing APIs that expose the models natively, it ended up being a waste of time.
It's right here: https://gemini.google/subscriptions/
Have used them both for work with google workspace accts, and personally, with antigravity in linux.
> get them on my personal accounts
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).
It's confusing for enterprises, too. Believe it or not, the cloud sales team recommends hiring partners to set up basic auth and "landing zones" for the APIs.
Flash-lite haiku luna
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.
Omni is a video editing model, and flash implies it's a lighter weight one than what they have/could have. The other labs don't have competing models here.
What's Carbon then? I haven't been paying much attention to Google but their naming has been confusing me.
Luna/Terra/Sol/Astra was a bit pretentious but at least the sizing makes sense. (I imagined the meeting... "Ok guys, we're getting mogged on naming... what's more epic than a Myth?" -"The SUN!")
Anthropic makes sense with the literary "scale" naming, mostly.
Is a Carbon bigger than an Argon though? Maybe it has to do with the atomic number?
Argon is not same tier as Astra and Fable. the upcoming, similarly unavailable Carbon maybe is.
That's one take. Gemini free mode is my default LLM app on phone. Their conversational AI is really good. They're still the leader in search results which makes Gemini responses really good. And, it's also really fast. I still only pay Anthropic but Gemini is seriously good, and free.
Counter point: you have to sign your life away to use it
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.
Its weird how with every gemini release there's a top comment like this. Gemini models are really good, and all companies have internal models they dont let the public have access too, they just dont tell us about them.
This narrative seems astroturfed particularly hard on this website. Like Google's AI isnt allowed to be praised on HN.
> I literally don't care about their models anymore because I can't even try them without paying for them?
Where are you finding ways to try e.g. Opus without paying for it?
Reread. GP is already paying an active subscription, and hitting friction when trying to give them additional money.
well, search is free right? the hostility here is a little excessive
I agree with you that Google models are too hard to access, but also:
> 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?
yep they need to improve their harness and their ai ecosystem and make it simpler. They have great ai system but the data retention policy is very bad if you turn it off you lose all of your previous chat data. They need to think from the point of customers nit only profits.
This sentiment is the top comment I'm seeing on every recent Google release. That it's impossible to actually access the tech, or even pay for it.
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
Also Vercel:
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.
Gemini is completely integrated in my company's ecosystem. They don't care that you don't use it.
I just use their models via openrouter. I have an account with OpenAI, Ollama , even deepseek platform. But for all google ai stuff, I just use openrouter.
Not only is it easy to pay but I also don’t risk getting my account banned.
100% this. I have genuinely tried to use Gemini models - tried to pay for them, but its practically impossible to navigate Google Cloud (vertex, antigravity, etc)console to even find where to pay - after great meat proxy efforts, I fix billing issues (or I think I fix them) the model stops working suddenly. Its shocking how bad Google AI has been
I paid, ran antigravity cli, getting 500 on the image tool because the model the cli wants to use is not available? There are no other models to choose. Im so confused
That, and gemini (app or web) has been bugging for months for me. I'd get "something wrong happened" every 3-4 queries, sometimes a few retries made it work, sometimes not. That this happens for a day is understandable, that this is unsolved after weeks or months is incomprehensible to me and literally forced me to a competitor (which I immediately found to be better anyway)
I mentioned to an Antigravity dev at an event that I am not likely to try their models if I am forced to use their harness as Antigravity isn't a super great harness so even if they release a good model I'm forced to (if I want to use subscription) to also use their bad harness.
I agree and I'm guessing the reason is that Google's real incentive is using their own AI in search and their internal products. While they should care about other developers building on top of them (via Google Cloud), they have an even bigger customer which is their internal teams.
They may have dropped the ball on AI-for-programmers, but the Google slopbot is the one the normies use. As much as their AI summaries used to be the biggest joke in the industry, today they're the one I think normies who aren't "AI people" are using the most day-to-day. I see a lot of people doing it:
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.
Bingo, this is exactly how I use AI personally. There’s just too much SEO spam to wade through on search results anymore, and Google’s AI Mode RAG is pretty good at citing trustworthy sources when I want to dive in.
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.
> It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI.
Aside from winning the Nobel prize in chemistry.
> I can't even try them without paying for them?
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!
Alphabet is a company with too much money and resources, which means they don't end up trying very hard to acquire and retain customers for any of these products since it's just a blip in their overall revenue. It's time to split them up.
I can't use it. The webpage reloads continuously after logging in. It's probably some ad blocker add-on, but it's the only web AI that doesn't work, so I simply don't use it at all.
At some point they will find a good enough model to replace google search completely and then everyone will use them. They just need to figure out the monetization
yes, it is so difficult and frustrating even i want to pay google to use their AI. But I don't think Google employees are this incompetent. They are probably doing this to turn customers away because they don't have enough compute ? Anyway, I am selling all my Google stocks.
I agree but they are probably losing a lot less money by pay walling than the other 2 main startups...
I think the gap here is you're thinking that you are their customer.
We literally paid them for a Gemini subscription. How does that not make us a customer?
On top of that, the inference is painfully slow. I’m now convinced Gemini is no better than ChatGPT or Claude. They haven’t even managed fast responses on the Flash model, and I’m paying for Pro. Gemini, you suck.
The most annoying thing with Gemini: you give it a url, and ask it a question about it, then it replies with something like: "I wasn't able to access the website you shared (url) directly. Based on information from similar webpages ... blah blah"
Come on, do you think I'm crazy? Google who can't read internet pages? Sheezzz ...
It truly is. I acutallu signed up for an annual plan because I used the image models for design ideas on my house. Few weeks ago they announced changes, no more pro models. It’s laughable how much they keep screwing up.
AI is a threat to Google's main business of advertising (primarily through search). They're on the AI bandwagon because otherwise their stock price will plummet but they're secretly hoping the AI bubble will pop and they can go back to showing ads full time.
skill issue?
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Google is a dying company. Abandon the ship! Everything they do in terms of AI is really worthless.
This is a new video model. It is not a replacement for Gemini 4, it is doing something altogether different.
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.
The "omni" naming for a video-only model is so confusing. I was under the impression omni referred to models that can output text and audio too.
To my understanding it has nothing to do with output and entirely to do with the understanding of the input together as basically one input stream. An LLM with a vision encoder or audio encoder takes the media and turns them into tokens the LLM reads and then turns into its text latents (basically).
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.
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It's double the cost in Flow, but 30% cheaper via the API. And Flow has always been much cheaper than the API (by 5-6x).
Right now
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.
(but I'm happy for people using the API)
It shows me that single prompt costs 30 credits. Also shows that 50 credits refresh daily, so I can make 1 video per day for free. I did one, with 20 credits remaining.
I goes straight to try it on Flow, genarate some motocycle riding scene. The character consistency improvement is neglegible but my bike is moving in reverse...wait. These flash model never inspired trust or anything.
Meanwhile I have a blast using Wan 3.0, that's what we called real character consistency.
The rollout is so confusing. Going straight to the Gemini app and asking when I can use this model gets me vague and contradicting answers. Ultimately it sounds like the Vids rollout will take 1-3 days, and you can go to vids.new on desktop to see if you’ve won the lottery and have it available now, apparently on any free Google account. Business accounts can use it too. Meanwhile the Gemini app is getting it on paid plans, but with different video length limits and no clear rollout timeline. If you pay for the API, it’s available now apparently.
Why is this so difficult to figure out?
https://flow.google.com/ is where most people would use the model. You get credits with your monthly sub that you can spend on flow.
Never even heard of this until today.
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.
Uhg that’s my issue. I keep getting it mixed up with https://wave.google.com/
Go with the Flow, don’t ride the Wave.
I have an Ultra sub and only see Veo and Omni 1.1 models.
I opened ai studio and i see it popping up, on a normal account: https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat?model=gemini-om...
>Going straight to the Gemini app and asking when I can use this model gets me vague and contradicting answers.
In other words, business as usual.
I’m still afraid to use Google models because my gmail (which my life kinda depends on) is connected to it and I’m afraid of getting blocked or sth because of some weird prompt.
You encapsulate self censorship and its effectiveness quite well.
Yes, it would be nice for them to mitigate that.
ya they really shot themselves in the foot with this one
Completely random, but I was inspecting the source code for their Omni 1.2 Flash web page, and there are insane amount of newlines. There are seven newlines between the first line and the DOCTYPE. There are huge amount of newlines between each section. What did they use to generate this website?
Enterprise websites tend to have very complicated content generation systems with little care about performance (including html/css/js size). What's hypocritical is that Google penalizes in SERP sites which have poor performance score yet Google's own sites are far from exemplary.
Enterprise websites have often enough this issue.
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
Perhaps they used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
It's the watermarking of the AI they used :)
What's this name and versioning now, NOBODY understands Google's Ai products, including subscribers to them.
Why their models go from 3 to 4 but then whatever this is starts at 1 I honestly don't care anymore
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
honestly the naming on all of them from all companies is weird unless you 'know where to look'. I get having a cool code name for each one. But give me a clear way to look at it and see why should I use one model over another? like 'low/medium/high' something?! please!
Yeah, it would be nice if there was some standardized naming. You'd think these AI companies would benefit if users actually knew which models were the fast ones and which models were the more capable ones. It's easy for the layman to get bad output and come to the wrong conclusion, writing off an entire brand.
Maybe it's because I'm more in the Anthropic ecosystem, but I find their naming convention pretty straight forward. I've given up trying to follow OpenAI, but they have a version number that goes up and sometimes they call one of them "cyber" so you know it's I guess extra good at red teaming?
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
I desperately wish Google would focus on improving the Gemini capabilities that are built-in to their office suite (docs, slides, etc.). The current built-in Gemini is terrible, and if I could use e.g. Claude natively with those products my workday would be an order of magnitude more productive.
I'm shocked that they don't seem to be investing in agentic capabilities there at all.
I built https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs basically for this. It lets any agent you want create rich documents - word, slides, spreadsheets, mermaid diagrams, rich code rendering, etc. About to launch a cloud first version of it, so what's on the site now will evolve soon.
You can use Claude in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16951679-use-claude-i...
Despite basically reinventing the rulebook for modern office products Google still seems the least interested to do anything innovative or progressive with it.
Claude (and ChatGPT) has pretty good browser plugins that I use for integration with Google Docs. Between that when I am editing something on the tab and the mcp that lets it load files for context in chat I haven’t seen any blockers to my workflows, might be worth checking out.
Gemini in Google Docs products is embarrassingly bad. Like Microsoft Copilot-levels of "shove AI into everything even if it's dumber or more limited than than GPT-3".
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.
Instead they fire the person that made Google Workspace CLI and focus on things that are flashy for demos. You can generate a cat balancing on a ball into your Slide if you want!
Somewhere in the middle of the video it would suddenly scroll one screen back, happens with all videos on the page, eh
When playback ends on one of the videos, the page jumps back to that video for some reason. I saw this too when I had multiple videos playing at once and the earlier clip on the page finished while watching another one lower on the page.
noticed that too
Still can't handle the prompts I throw at it, though the 15 seconds gives more breathing room. Not being able to use first and last frames for the longer videos doesn't render it useless, but it gets pretty close (the model just cannot reproduce unusual or idiosyncratic character designs without first and last frames; fat, muscular, ugly, and non-human characters regress to tv commercial blandness).
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.
Price is $1.50 in Input and $9.00/$12.00 (text/video) in Output per 1M tokens
$0.07 per second for 720p video.
A simple observation I have
> 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 built a youtube-immolation machine - but to what end?
Parity with their admitted Search-immolation machine maybe
Not sure why this is so mysterious to everyone.
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.
Is the previous Gemini 4 Carbon model live yet? I still don't see it on OpenRouter... but this one seems to be there
It's amazing to me how poor adoption has been for video models, at least in my corner of the internet. I see considerably more Code to Video content from libraries like HyperFrames than any native AI video. It seems that users are much more open to AI coded "Explained style" videos than anything else.
Maybe for the west, sure. If you check Chinese websites like douyin or bilibili you will see AIGC stuff is thriving right now.
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.
The irony too is how much less censored the Chinese models are.
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.
It's still pretty inconsistent, slow, and expensive. I have claude write up massive prompts with reference images and it'll still come out poorly, but since I'm not generating much revenue with the product I use these models for, I just accept a lot of the sloppiness. I have tried a lot of different prompts, I think video just has a lot more free space to differ from our mental models than something like code that is a lot more well-defined.
Extending an exiting video by 15 seconds is pretty nuts.
That is sad... I tried to guess and ignore AI videos (created to be deliberately misleading as "realistic") by length, but I guess that time is over now.
Huh, the latest model just one-shot through my private cultural sensitivity test. In the past they got stuck into the nudity filters and you really had to assure the models that no, this is normal in Finland. The latest Veo models one-shot the male models, but needed extra coaxing for them to allow women to appear in the videos.
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.
Okay, I just wanted to vent: I'm on the Pro plan and I've not been able to use Argon for the past 4 days - every time I send a prompt I get downgraded to a Flash model.
Makes me consider cancelling the plan entirely.
https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Not going to even read this post. While I have been really bullish on Google I am now tired of them constantly baiting us with vaporware announcements unfortunately.
Why do we need this?
TFA is literally a marketing piece for why someone might want to use it. If you personally don't need it, that's ok, you're just not their target audience.
its pretty telling that the only compelling argument put forth by their own article is 'advertising'
Hot take, Google should focus on their open weight models. I use Qwen 3.8 and it’s been amazing. I would pay for Max but there’s no provider or server here in the states. If they had an amazing Gemma 5, I would seriously consider trying their closed source models. Model comfort and familiarity is a real thing.
I'd also love to see Gemini 4 Flash
Of all the uses of AI, producing convincing video is just about the worst one in my opinion.
Wait, I thought we were on Gemini 4?
It would be incredibly helpful to me if AI model names followed cars.
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."
They aren't far from cars. Cars have generations and each generation has distinct models, for market (region), body style, maybe generational steps with facelift, etc. So your "2005 Corolla" is Corolla Gen9 (2000-2007), designated E120/E130 (no idea how they differ), and can be 3-door/5-door hatchbacks, 4-door sedan, station wagon, varying which market you look at.
They used to do that and everyone hated it lol. Hackernews complained endlessly about model names that were just a size and a date.
Omni is a video model.
Which, from a naming standpoint, doesn't make any sense
But it still starts with “Gemini”. It would be better if they called it Gemini Omni 4, 4.1 etc. Otherwise call it just Omni 1.2 and drop the Gemini prefix.
It’s still bad versioning and will confuse people.
Why cant I add a MCP server to any of the Google AI products unless I subscribe to https://business.gemini.google/ . This is like selling a laptop with out a USB port.
> more cost-effective generation
Funny how this presser doesn't include the Google Flow price increases such as 720p 10s under 1.1 was 15 credits and now under 1.2 it's 30 credits.
Why can't they just name it 'Gemini Video'?
They already have Veo
Trying to "test" the model on OpenRouter, and keep failing with Gemini uptime being "68%".
What a great way to start.
It seems to me that LLMs are using simulation for cloth generations.
They move a lot like 3d models.
It’s not the LLMs themselves, it’s the training data that they are trained on being supplemented by synthetic video from simulations / 3D rendering.
Google, just go back to making products instead of throwing announcements.
I pay and I still can't test it, how is Google this incompetent?
Anybody figured out a way to use it? Is it even live?
Maybe I’m using antigravity wrong, so I’d love to be corrected here:
* 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”.
At least this one is available immediately.
please integrate it to antigravity cli
Waiting for someone to test it with "~~A pelican~~Will Smith eating pasta while riding a bicycle" or something...
I don't trust Google on AI. They should do an spin off if they want to be relevant in AI.
DeepMind would be a good name for it!
If I understand correctly, the use-case for this is video B-roll? Because what else am I supposed to do with 15s of videos.
So, to badly impersonate N-Gate, "Business Model: Uber for Getty Images"
The average length of a shot in full length feature film today is like three seconds. Even back in the old days, the average shot was like 12 seconds. Most movies are made up sequences and scenes made up of lots and lots of shots.
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.
That's cool, but I don't see why one would want to watch a movie like that.
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.
Plenty of things. I am using it to create a dataset of fatigued drivers for the company I work. It keeps the starting frame / angle really well and is the best I tried so far. We are building a fatigue detection model for safety.
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it’s a shame that Google/Gemini decided to restrict and fuck other adventurous yet extremely gracious paying customers; who were excited at the prospect of not being locked in to two obnoxious companies.
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.
> who were excited at the prospect of not being locked in to two obnoxious companies.
Is being locked in to three obnoxious companies that much better?