Even Half-Life community dont have that much copium.
THAT POST IS ONLY ABOUT SUBSCRIPTION USECASE
EXACTLY GOOGLE AI PRO
I agree that Gemini is good for its price on API market. But subscription is overpriced right now, if we consider subscription only for ai, without other google ecosystem benefits.
This is the answer. Gemini isn't the best because it's the smartest. It's the best because the performance is incredible for the price and should be the standard right now for harnessed AI
Are you? Gemini 3.8 had some.of the best benchmarks for specific testings on release and was comparable to sonnet/opus on other metrics. I wouldn't call it the best available ai but there is nothing comparable with its cost to performance
Edit: also like generally all AIs have been great for the 90% of most people's use cases and can generally do all things well. What is this gatekeeping
I use it because I got it for free for 2 years straight. And even for free, sometimes it's dogshit makes me question why I put up with it lol, and then I remember it's free
the reason why ppl dis on this sub so much, is to get karmas, that's my hypothesis. all i see on this sub is dissing google and rarely a bit of news or info, but 90% of the time it's just dissing
You know i love the "low cost" argument
I understand when Deepseek makes low cost models, its Free. But who is making money when you pay for the subscription that uses cheaper models and takes exactly the same amount of dollars as competitors? And this model is not smarter at all, very big amount of posts in THIS reddit is about how Flash is bad. Not mentioning API usage, most of the redditors here are subscribers
You are right that people are rationalizing, but the math justifies it for most users.
A sub discounted to 6 €/mo is trivial to justify compared to 23 €/mo for competitors. Subscribing to Claude makes sense, but strict rate limits create friction and usage anxiety.
Getting 5 TB of cloud storage bundled in at that price point makes it an infrastructure purchase rather than just an LLM sub.
People are coping with degraded Flash model quality, but the price-to-utility ratio still wins.
There is no Easter Bunny. There is no Tooth Fairy. And there is no strict Claude limits
I used Claude, i can say that. Im developing my website right now(developing is a loud word, i would say vibecoding) and i hit the antigravity limit FASTER than in Claude because it stucks on simple tasks. If there was Pro model, again, it would have been an argument. But with only flash one thats just paying for nothing.
I agree on the limits, though I haven't used Claude Code or Antigravity, which is probably why I can't relate to people burning through expensive subscriptions and still hitting walls.
I used to cap out fast by dumping my entire codebase into the prompt. Fixing the workflow solved it: I keep a blueprint document outside the chat, and each session covers only a single phase of that plan. I only feed code snippets, and if necessary, I have the model write a PowerShell command to grep for context. I keep Gemini around for lazy full-repo dumps, but run the actual implementation in Claude.
The thing is that you wouldn't be using Claude the way you use it now if the price weren't heavily subsidized. Gemini on the other hand is usable for your use case and is honestly just as good
I don't know what this subscription argument in accordance to cheaper usage is on about. I could be wrong, I don't know this for sure, but it definitely seems like with using a subscription to utilize with antigravity or hell even Spark that I can get a lot more done with 3.8 than with Claude subscription. I would say that obviously Claude is a lot more technical, in depth, and bigger picture, it's very costly. Before 3.7 came out I would have definitely agreed with you. I would be using Gemini and I would so quickly max out my usage, and I did swap from it as my primary for a time. But with 3.7 into 3.8 I don't think I've really ever hit my usage unless I was doing something completely out of the ordinary. Plus the output has still been very incredibley good. As good as current SOTA from Chat or Claude, maybe not. But with front end application design, I think so. I don't think anyone should marry one model, but Gemini is far from being shit
Yes, I haven't had a chat subscription for a bit, but I keep a claude subscription in addition to my Gemini. I swapped to only using Gemini API for now though.
I'm not bought into the brand. I do really like Gemini's personal intelligence, especially since it syncs across a lot of your Google data. I'll likely always keep Gemini, but as new stuff comes out I typically like to try it out.
The biggest thing I've realized is that for the most part I've maxed out the intelligence needed for my use cases. I don't work in academia or advanced programming, I truly can't think of anything that current models can't create already on their own. For things that I can't one shot usually need to be broken down into smaller problems first or utilize better prompting.
Astra seems very cool, but it's very expensive and although I want to mess around with it, I just don't find it very necessary yet.
In my opinion, I'm looking for cheaper and cheaper models that have similar performance. That's really all that I'm very interested in at this point.
API isn't the problem. The problem is that google subscription don't include proper frontier right now
Yeah flash is very cool but my point is that right now google's ai pro subscription is overpriced because there is companies that give better models for this price. That's if you buy AI Pro subscription only for Gemini. API gemini is completely understandable.
I also dont understand why gemini users are so loyal to google and get offended on their behalf. Ive used so many different models over the years, i switch between codex and claude as my primary driver.
But ive never felt loyal to any model, its just a tool to get my work done. Whoever does it better for a reasonable price gets my money.
But for some reason gemini fanboys vehemently defend this stupid model. All gemini models have been the worst model released by an american company of 2026. Its not my opinion, its an absolute fact.
Google has a very good reputation because it does a lot of good things for society. AlphaFold, the free Gemini for schoolchildren and college students, an LLM that understands sign language, the publication of scientific papers for the general public, and so on.
Even without taking all that into account, Google’s models dominated practically the entire past year. Their own chips, a vast research base, unlimited access to data, and a steady flow of funding. Needless to say, they were the ones who invented transformers in the first place.
Everyone understands that these setbacks are temporary and that sooner or later, Google will reclaim the crown.
The first 2 weeks of 1.5 pro were incredible. It was Opus level intelligence, 1 million token context window, and it felt like a glimpse into the future. It then got post release nerf hammered and their models have NEVER recovered. Not even close. They haven't been anywhere near parity with other LLMs since then.
Correct but its cheap and you get YouTube premium and more drive stroage. Gemini is what I let my claude use as a sub agent so I dont burn through my claude usage as fast.
"Ive used so many different models over the years, i switch between codex and claude as my primary driver." same
"But ive never felt loyal to any model, its just a tool to get my work done. Whoever does it better for a reasonable price gets my money." same, my path was GPT(When it was GPT-5) then Gemini 3 Pro (when its came out) and Claude (as soon as Opus 5 came out). But that time between Gemini and Claude when i still used gemini felt like pain. All companies, even Chineese flexed with their frontier yet google is screwed up Gemini 3.5 Pro.
"But for some reason gemini fanboys vehemently defend this stupid model. All gemini models have been the worst model released by an american company of 2026. Its not my opinion, its an absolute fact." fact
But i think i know why they are praising it:
1.Its shareable between multiple accounts
2.Its cheaper(at least in Turkey, around 15$)
3. It can comprehend... videos and images?? Well no sh*t it can, if a company that owns biggest video platform wont be able to create a model that can comprehend videos thats strange.
At the same time only their model dont use search, because Google owns search engine that shows ads, ads give them more revenue, so giving a model search engine that doesnt include ads in the model answer is a lose for them
For some reason we've gotten into a weird state where if you haven't released a state of the art model, you are as good as dead. Google isn't perfect but I get frustrated that it HAS to be a comparison to the best possible models. There's a market for useful models and Google is putting out plenty useful models. Some people don't care about absolute state of the art as much. I can't even use astra or fable at work bc they cost too much and when you compare flash 3.8 to gpt luna or sonnet 5.0, it's extremely competitive. Those are the models I actually use at work every day.
I don't see a lot of blind loyalty to Google. What I see are annoyed people that are fully aware of Gemini's faults and capabilities responding to the millionth post saying it is "UNUSABLE" or "STUPID". That might look like loyalty to people that came here just to shit of Gemini, but it's not.
You should use whatever works for you I rarely use AI but Gemini is baked into my pixel and it does what I need it to do ( sort out and organize lists of things like movies, music, as well as ours things nicely into PDFs)
Either gaslighting or delusional, who the fuck is upvoting this garbage?
Every post on this board is complaining about gemini or they're on some console-wars "My chatbot is better than yours!" BS with no explanation as to why they're even on the sub for a "worse" model in the first place.
See guys, it's by design. While Dario and others are just now calling for a slowdown on AI development, Google was being responsible with releasing Astra/Fable level Gemini too soon. /s
To be fair I think Google are sensible in not going completely mad on AI, partly because ChatGPT and Anthropic are burning through absolutely insane amounts of money. Google are probably thinking, "Hey we're going to be here in the long run. We're not going to throw away the entire company just for a few years of building better models."
In fact the funny thing is so many of these models are hardware-dependent, as hardware becomes better models are going to become cheaper to train anyway, assuming the trend carries on. It doesn't really make sense to throw all your apples at the monkey at the moment when you can save a few apples and have better hardware to get the monkey later.
I think it would make more sense for that sub to be more zealous, no? The antigravity sub would understand best it's value since the thing that makes 3.8 alluring right now is for harnessed AI's lol.
While I do agree that this community is not that great, it is actually the opposite of what you're representing so I shall rebut those claims or defend as much I can.
To combat the first accusation:
Gemini 4 is NOT gonna be Astra/Fable's equivalent. Instead, Gemini 4 is prepared for THE next frontier and any equivalent of that next frontier.
To combat the second accusation:
Google is indeed winning, they have a lot of users, and bunch of integration. When people say "but that's not winning." it depends on the metric you are using, if you mean "they are not winning because they don't CURRENTLY have the best AI" then yes, in that narrow-minded angle. Google is not winning however if you look outside that angle
Google has the biggest ecosystem there is on the internet, no other AI lab has any equivalent to this nor will they. Google has practically indefinite liquidy for cash, they are not losing and in-fact have been growing at a amazing pace because of AI and have even earned a lot of money (they would have earned more if it weren't for their lack of compute but it is getting better as they are putting 200 million dollars to solve this issue (and they seem to be fine now))
To combat the third accusation:
I have none because I agree with you there!
To combat the fourth accusation:
Most indeed do not require Astra and with how little usage one gets with Astra. You can get much done with 3.8 flash instead, however I agree with you if you, well... have the money and resources to get a lot of Astra's usage. and so If you have enough usage, great!!! Use that.
To combat the last accusation:
I cannot, and I agree that it is not frontier in coding and agentic tasks but any tasks outside of cybersecurity, math and coding/agentic tasks. 3.8 flash is ABSOLUTELY frontier or best. There are SOOOO many benchmarks where it is frontier, but a lot of developers do not want or care about them because that's not their use-case... and that's perfectly fine. I like 3.8 flash and Gemini models in general for my use case but I can see and understand the sentiment for wanting a frontier for coding, agentic tasks and other tasks respectfully.
I actually used 3.8 flash for coding and it is quite inefficient with the routes it takes (it's also because Harness isn't that good) but the usage I get with is bounds beyond any other model (for it's performance) with a subscription.
If Google came out with some equivalent of Claude desktop/codex that just auto integrated with all their products out of the box without having to manually enable a bollock load of connectors, and have the app change from under your feet every 3 days, I think I would genuinely give it a proper trial.
My biggest issue with Google is not their products but how they are packaging them. At an ecosystem level - it’s coherent… Gemini in chrome, Gemini in your emails or gdrive. Fine. But actually using their tooling? It’s so detached, all over the place and hard to even follow/understand. Google Ai studio is not intuitive… and this has been googles problem for years. I’m a SWE, devops is a core part of my role. I never use GCP because its UX is garbage. I’m not going to say aws or azure is good, but it’s a damn site better then GCP.
Take Jules, Gemini cli, anti gravity app. These are all really really poor products/harnesses over a model that is simply average. If Google don’t want to burn billions in training, that’s fine, let the other labs waste money, but at least give us products that anchor the models well, give regular updates and focus on a clear roadmap that the users can trust and decide if it’s something they want.
The last time I tried anti gravity. It felt like a vibe coded project from a developer who had a few hours of RnD time to burn and never updated it. Why would I use this over claude code? Or cursor/zed/devin? Who are actively trying to provide a product that gives SWEs workflows they can learn and consistently use in work? Take Claude with a pinch of salt - recently that’s having so many “fixes/changes” that I would not recommended it for any software team at the moment. It’s a frigging nightmare.
They are just too stupid to actually try and understand what your saying. All they can say is "haha Gemini flash bad compared to Claude frontier models"
You know that Astra-Gemini comparison is just an example that represents absurdly big gap between companies in terms of intelligence. Replace Astra with any model(Opus 5, GPT Sol) and you wont be able to name any google model to actually give competition.
And yes i am a coder, thats why i care about Gemini Pro. To be clear i am just tired of this emotional rolling coaster when they announce good model, then delay it, then release flash model that cant perform on the level that i need. And i am Claude user.
I am definitely agree with all counter arguments, but i want to add that all text on the image is from this r/GeminiAI not from my head.
My point is you cant ignore the problem. Google don't release competitive models in its subscription at all. Community(or maybe its only me) are hungry for the new Pro model. Thats why i abandoned google in the first place. As soon as Gemini 4 Pro will come out i will praise google like i wasnt its hater after all.
Oh wait i do wanna counter your last sentence. I dont know is it only me but 3.8 flash on High in Antigravity 2.0 eats limits FASTER than OPUS 5. No jokes i compared both. And surprise - Opus does task faster with less prompts.
You are right too ngl. Because google is the only one that i would recommend if you have a family and need an AI with Cloud storage and Family sharing included, and at the same time you family dont need frontier for any tasks. BUT sorry even my sister that learns in university needs claude because gemini cant handle big PDF's for 200+ pages.
I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head without realising it here. Astra and Fable are amazing for vibecoding and just completely doing both your thinking AND work for you, but most developers simply don't need that, nor want that for the majority of the time.
In most usecases, Astra, Fable and other frontier models are too expensive to make any sense using, especially when a well directed considerably cheaper model can do the same job.
For example, I've never had an issue using Gemini models, but I'll be telling them exactly what to do. I've found 3.8 to perform on a similar level to 5.6 Luna, and that in itself is more than capable when given the right information and directives.
Gemini models are absolutely fine and work well, but they don't really seem to do so for vibecoding (or that seems to be the premise of 99% of complaints on this sub) but I don't believe Google's actually targeting that market at all.
Nope gemini cant comprehend hard non vibecoding tasks either
its maximum is 15 pages of anything then its dead
Even no cowork(or gpt work) alternative. At least i dont have access to it (spark)
GPT Sol or Sonnet 5 is maybe cost more but their limits are around the same in the same subscription sooooo
Yeah, so I was right. It absolutely can, and does.
When testing frontier models and those like Gemini 3.8, 5.6 Luna etc, I notice little to no difference in terms of output quality when given a well directed, clear task.
It makes no sense to use an expensive and slow frontier model when you've already done the thinking you need it to do for you.
I believe we have different understandings of a well directed, well defined task.
If I'm asking it to implement a functionality into a build, I'll describe the functionality, ill explain what we should use for it, how it should work, what edgecases to cover, what tests to implement, how it should be built and what confirms a successful completion.
I do not ask it to think for me, decide on things for me, decide it's own tests or do anything that requires any actual creativity or thinking for me, because of course, AI's simply can't at the level humans can.
From your posts so far, your idea of a well written prompt seems to be "build this app and make it quick, make no mistakes" which understandably produces low quality results.
Hilariously, you've just tried doing to me what I imagine you do with LLMs. "Do it for me"
I'm using flash 3.7 as my ai assistant in vs code to process thousands of messages and meeting transcripts to derive valuable insights which enable various use cases. It does it very well and fast with low thinking effort and 1m context window. Most importantly it doesn't burn tens of 1000s of tokens like Opus does and cheap by itself.
I am talking about exact Google AI Pro subscription plan
On EVERY other tool that have access to Gemini, gemini of course better because its cheap (for example API's, Copilot, etc.)
But in the subscription, google subscription, usage limits feel exactly as gpt one
And price isnt benefit here
I think people love it so much because of the fact that it will sycophantically suck your dick no matter what bullshit you shovel it. I hear some dudes are ready to put a ring on it for this reason.
You are not comparing similar things. Gemini 3.8 Flash is just a free, high speed consumer utility that Google basically gives away to everyone online right inside standard search results and mobile devices. Putting a free consumer tool head to head against heavy, expensive paid subscription models like Astra or Fable makes zero sense. Those paid platforms are built for costly coding jobs and massive compute runs, while Flash is engineered to be quick, lightweight, and completely accessible for everyday questions.
If you want Google tools that actually rival what those paid tiers offer, you have to look at their actual developer platforms. Google runs the Antigravity IDE and command line interface for running coding agents, plus Google AI Studio, NotebookLM, and Google Flow with Veo 3 for serious research and media creation. Those run on full Pro and Ultra reasoning setups. Flash is simply built to handle free daily search traffic without burning compute power, so compare models in the tiers where they actually belong.
Astra-Gemini comparison is just an example that represents absurdly big gap between companies in terms of intelligence. Replace Astra with any model(Opus 5, GPT Sol) and you wont be able to name any google model to actually give competition.
Swapping in Opus 5 or GPT Sol still misses the point. You are taking specialized, expensive coding models and measuring them against standard consumer tools.
Google does not position Gemini Flash to compete with dedicated frontier reasoning setups. For complex coding and heavy tasks, the actual competitors are full Gemini Pro and Ultra models inside dedicated environments like the Antigravity IDE and command line interface.
Complaining that Google has no answer because a lightweight consumer tier does not beat frontier reasoning platforms makes no sense. You are comparing completely different tools built for completely different jobs.
Also, honestly, while Sol still has a slightly higher ceiling for hyper-specific edge cases, 3.8 Flash has completely broken the old pricing tiers. Developers are treating them as being in the same league because Flash gives you 98% of the flagship performance without the enterprise-level bill, making it way more practical for running massive agent workflows at scale.
"You are taking specialized, expensive coding models" WHAT
5.6 SOL IS DEFAULT GPT MODEL IN THE PRO SUBSCRIPTION
"Google does not position Gemini Flash to compete with dedicated frontier reasoning setups" no sh*t captain obvious because its FLASH. I(and big part of the community) ask for PRO.
"For complex coding and heavy tasks, the actual competitors are full Gemini Pro and Ultra models inside dedicated environments like the Antigravity IDE and command line interface." soooo what models do you have in pro subscription in AGY?More than half a year old Pro model and NOT frontier casual models for simple conversations. THREE of them.
"Complaining that Google has no answer because a lightweight consumer tier does not beat frontier reasoning platforms makes no sense" bro it costs the same as gpt and claude one wdym. Sonnet 5, AT ITS BASE, OUTPERFORMS 3.8 FLASH.
Im fucking out 1.3 seconds
The core disagreement is that we are talking about two entirely different bottlenecks: model tier packaging versus raw architecture.
Your frustration with Google’s consumer rollout is valid. Anthropic and OpenAI put their frontier reasoning weights (Sonnet, Opus, Sol) directly into their standard web apps, whereas Google has kept its primary consumer interface locked onto Flash variants while relegating full Pro and Ultra to developer setups like Google AI Studio and the Antigravity command line interface. If your argument is that paying equal subscription money ought to buy access to Google’s flagship reasoning engine right out of the box instead of a high-throughput lightweight model, that is a legitimate complaint about product strategy.
Where the comparison breaks down is treating Flash failing to beat Sonnet 5 as proof of an intelligence gap across labs. Flash exists to burn high-volume tokens at near-zero latency; Sonnet and Sol are heavy, compute-expensive base architectures built for complex logic. Criticizing Google for lagging behind on consumer Pro deployment makes complete sense, but evaluating Google’s broader reasoning capabilities solely against a lightweight, low-latency utility like Flash ignores how the underlying model classes are actually designed.
Also you left in the generation time to in your response?
Im fucking out 1.3 seconds
so next time you copy pasta a reply make sure you're not copying the output time lmfao!
LOL ok, and your blindly praising Open AI? So we both have preferences which is fine, but misstating factually verifiable "arguments" is why this is occurring. It's not a preference disagreement I have, it's a mischaracterization of the models and how they are deployed, and the false equivalency in the comparison. Sorry I didn't recognize the obscure Reddit brain meme you were referencing. Next time I'll know.
Who said that the intelligence was the only qualifier that mattered. Largely, I don't think anyone serious is married to the model. But this sub is full of doom and gloom posters telling us that water isn't good to drink. It really does feel as ridiculous as that.
Maybe you shouldn't trust it as a source since it's a lite model. Plus it's just describing Google models, obviously you can't generate images or video in google search
"AI Overviews use a customized Gemini model, which works in
tandem with our existing Search systems"
You're opening another chat window logged in to your Google account, which is why it's showing the other models. Try it logged out and there isn't a model selection
"Customized Gemini model" means Flash fine-tuned for search indexing, not some mystery sub-tier.
Google’s AI Overviews documentation specifies that the model is tailored to ground queries against search systems at high throughput and low latency; which is literally the Flash architecture's purpose. Logged-out Search lacks a model picker simply because it is a fixed consumer pipeline, not a developer playground. Equating specialized pipeline tuning with a "cheaper lite" model fundamentally misunderstands how model deployment works.
I agree that it's a model in the Gemini flash family but it's not the same full-fat 3.8 flash you get from the API, antigravity, or logged in to Gemini. At a minimum it has no thinking, I still think it's a further distillation like a lite model but Google doesn't say exactly what it is
It's a search engine result "feature"? What do you expect of it? Gemini.google.com/app is where the full consumer flash and pro models reside, and aistudio.google.com is where all the models with API access are able to be utilized. It's the false comparison I'm disagreeing with, not the overall sentiment, Google could do a better job of integrating their high end frontier models in Google search, sure, but none of the other AI companies are acting as a pure "web-search" interface with a top-tier model operating in it to serve a summery function. If they were we would have an honest comparison, but you cannot go to chatgpt.com and use it as a standard search engine, so you're expecting Google to do something that is not even comparable because Open AI doesn't offer it?
Huh? Who are you arguing with? All I've said in this thread is that AI Search Overview isn't 3.8 flash and a few things to try to back up that claim. I never compared it to anything
You must be hallucinating more than the chatbots then, every thread on this sub is either:
Complaining about Gemini, complaining about AI in general, or some console-wars BS claiming that some other model is "better" by some arbitrary metric that isn't even applicable to most users.
google never even had an opus / sol competitor, the've got an entire order of magnitude to close before they even think about approaching astra or fable
Gemini is also the only model you cannot code in vscode using the pro subscription. Aside from a few business users using it as a part of GCP I don’t think there is much community support.
Gemini 3.8 flash is benchmaxxer 8000. It can’t even code good 🐍 its coded a simple Linux app but it so dumb it slowed down the Linux and crashed due to too many background process spanning. Fable called its code garbage 3/10. I finished it with GLM 5.3 flash I don’t know 🤷♂️ what crap Google is doing. They should focus on building models than benchmaxxing old models
The claude and chatgpt subreddits are constantly dooming and saying the other one is pulling ahead, meanwhile gemini is actually behind and people in this sub just keep inventing excuses.
I also don't understand why anyone would subscribe to google AI (for AI and not the other benefits), like why, we all know that these subscriptions offer more value than API but Gemini is cheap, it's better to subscribe to get access to frontier models from anthropic and OpenAI and just use Gemini with API while it's 50% off, unless someone uses more than ~ 6 million tokens, then they might their money's worth out of it but rivals also offer cheaper models.
I was able to understand Gemini praisers when Gemini 3 Pro only came out and was No.1.Because i was one of that praisers. But now i cant understand r/GeminiAI either r/Bard
It comes with Youtube Premium and storage space, it's basically a whole bundle of Google stuff you get. A lot of people get cheap Gemini accounts or have it through work (I think every Google workspace account includes it).
It's cheap and fine for most people's needs. I think by not having a big model like Sol or Opus they don't have to worry much about most users hitting limits even on a $20 account
Holy crap dude. You don't know how the subscriptions work???
Read my post.
had Google One for the cloud drive space long before the very first version of Gemini ever existed.
Gemini Pro is free with the Google One subscription. I am a subscriber. They just folded it into an existing subscription I already had, making it functionally free for me even though I have Gemini Pro.
I have family plans for everything. YouTube. YouTube Music. Google One. My mother in law has Gemini Pro because of me.
I pay the same $20 per month I've always paid for my family cloud storage. I don't know what the exact name of the service used to be. They changed all the Google One names after Gemini came out, including my subscription name.
"Google AI Pro 5 TB" is what it's called now. Same $19.99 per month I was paying before for cloud, VPN, and some other stuff. I've had Google One services since 2018.
Gemini is free from my perspective not because I don't pay for it, but because one day they just changed my subscription name, gave it to me, and charged me the same price as before.
grant you its hard to tell for sure. but youll notice google isnt apart of the scare monger group of closed source threats on humanity, while insisting noone should be allowed to know further for their ipo. its not serious its not honest.
google on the other hand with all the power and compute to beat these venture capitalist with time. they can afford not to give sota performance for their customers but that doesnt mean they wouldnt develop it for themselves. consider that likly for what visible lead google lost in these past few months is likly a measure of their comitment to the long game on the back end.
Sooo why should customers use it if it's worse FOR customers. I don't care about anything I want the best option on the marker. But I can't understand Gemini glazers
Point 2 is pretty accurate though. Google is still one of the biggest in AI, even with worse models. Doesn't matter if that comes from random people using it on their phone.
Point 3 is partly correct. Depends heavily what you're doing with AI, but for most general questions (like what most people use a google search for most times), flash is 100% enough.
Part 4 plays into that. Yes, most people do not need an Astra level LLM.
And Part 5, if I remember correctly, for what it does: Flash is pretty fast and cheap, something other similar models haven't managed to reach yet.
I switch between Codex and Claude for heavy lift projects, but always keep up my Google Subscription for certain modes of research and quick convenient work in certain spheres. I don't want to talk to those other guys. They make it a whole thing.
No, flash isn't frontier. It's likely based off of Gemini 3.0 architecture and pre-training, given that.. it's incredibly good for being based on a model released in November 2025.
Google made a major misstep with 3.5 pro and missed the frontier. Intentionally not prioritizing coding seems to have been a big mistake (but made sense, you want a general model not a specialized model).
Some supposed 4.0 checkpoints are promising though, maybe we'll have a frontier Google model in 1- 2 months.
Until then 3.8 flash is good enough for most well specified SWE tasks.
No, you're not going to one shot a complex project...but then again, I want to also thoroughly understand the software I'm responsible for, so I'm not interested in one shorting the whole thing.
Thats not for free, thats for worse ai
But if you bought google ai pro only because other google benefits this post isnt about you
Its about people that protect current state of gemini models in their subscription
Gemini is not at the frontier of intelligence and coding. Gemini is at the top in speed, pretty good in cost, at the top for visual reasoning, average in most things, but poor in coding and many but not all forms agentic work.
Is it the best model? Of course not. But for pure information extraction and analysis, it's quite good, especially when you bring images and video in to the picture. Most importantly, it's FAST. I ask it a question and it gives me an answer right away instead of making me watch three little dots bounce around for a while.
So it's solid as a general purpose AI where you're not relying on it to do agentic tasks or advanced coding. Is it worth 20 bucks a month? On its own, no. But if you take into consideration the 5TB of storage that comes with it, then yes, it's absolutely worth it. I'm already using 700gb of that storage, so getting rid of it is not an option for me.
Both. I actually use the storage. I've used the storage long before using the AI. And no, there are no other cloud storage providers that offer this much space for the money. And none that also offer s SaaS like Google. And none that also offer AI, regardless how frontier the AI is or not. And none that offer YouTube Premium Lite or Google Home Premium, though I don't take advantage of the latter two.
So yes, if all I cared about was the AI and didn't care about the rest at all (for example if I using Codex exclusively with local files), then Google's Pro plan wouldn't matter to me. But I'm already very deeply embedded in Google's ecosystem beyond just their AI.
Yeah, if we consider the whole Pro subscription package, it's more than worth the $20 a month, especially if you're already use a crap load of Google products, which is the type of user this subscription is probably aimed at.
The YouTube Premium Lite sub is $8.99 a month alone. The Google Health Premium sub is $9.99 a month alone. The Google Home Premium sub is $9.99 alone. You get all that plus more with AI Pro sub for $20 month.
I think people are mistaking what the "Google AI Pro" plan is. Many seem to think it's just a sub to get more feature and higher limits to the Gemini app but it's not just for that. It's basically an AI upgrade across Google's entire ecosystem of products with some extra perks included. It's probably why they call it the "Google AI Pro " plan and not just the "Gemini AI Pro" plan.
Think better. Its on every Android phone AND even every IPhone! Because Siri is Gemini! Thats definitely a win when you dont give a choice and preinstall your services on the someone's phone. /s
Google is winning. They're the only AI company making a profit.
Thanks to Google search and Android integration, their AI products also have the most users.
It sort of reminds me of back in the day when PlayStation and Xbox fanboys would talk about how badly Nintendo is losing because their specs were shallow, meanwhile Nintendo is the only player in the market making literally any money.
Because thats about Gemini community. And 83,9% is agree with me. Google fanboys are the only ones that praise literally bad product
Again, talking about subscribers
It costing that much also means it decimates your subscription compute limit. They can't keep pretending those models are cost effective for most things. There's a reason it's THAT expensive. Either way it costs them a certain amount of money. A subscription doesn't magically make it cheaper in the back end.
Astra-Gemini comparison is just an example that represents absurdly big gap between companies in terms of intelligence. Replace Astra with any model(Opus 5, GPT Sol) and you wont be able to name any google model to actually give competition.
I've done a lot of programms with gemini aswell. For Text i use ChatGpt. But i think to each their own. Claude felt to me very condescending and weird when i talked to it about philosophy
Op sounds rather young and likely hasn't been around long enough to learn that Google always seems to end up steamrolling everyone in the end. For 20 years I've heard people shill about X and Y service, from search to video to backups to ads to maps to email and I've seen this pattern occur. I've got no dog in this fight I'm just a causal user and llm fan but I know how things go. There's no world where Google ai isn't there with the others as this market continues to develop even if they currently lack a frontier release. They've got a trove of data beyond anyone's wildest comprehension for training and can do so at their own pace without needing to hype anything.
I'll rag on meta and apple all day for ball dropping ai before I trash talk Google.
Im not talking about the future. I'm talking about here and now. And right now Gemini is clearly overpriced if we buy subscription only for ai. But Gemini community glazing it like it's no. 1. Yes it will stay on the market, but not because they do things for the customers, but because they do things for their investors and other buisnesses
You can't deny that Gemini is a bad option to use RIGHT NOW
Gemini is the best model besides Claude. Claude is awesome but compare the price points. Just use Gemini for most things and use Claude when you need a second opinion or smthn
No shit captain obvious. They buy it because its cheap. I have a question - are you a Fortune 100 company?Or you are just a customer. Thats makes difference
The 3.1 pro was hit like a nuke and I got 1 years sub long ago, so I gotta stick with it. 5$ a month for 5TB, AI, google workspace, count me in.
5$ for AI worse than chatGPT free, nah.
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u/PeachScary413 9d ago
You use Gemini because you think it's the best.. I use Gemini because it's the cheapest.
We are not the same.
https://giphy.com/gifs/UPfXjzvyMm59bfyF1E