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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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?

I agree but they are probably losing a lot less money by pay walling than the other 2 main startups...

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.

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 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.

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

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 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!

> It's insane how Google has dropped the ball almost completely with AI.

Aside from winning the Nobel prize in chemistry.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Gemini is completely integrated in my company's ecosystem. They don't care that you don't use it.

I think the gap here is you're thinking that you are their customer.

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?

Google is a dying company. Abandon the ship! Everything they do in terms of AI is really worthless.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

You can use Claude in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16951679-use-claude-i...

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.

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!

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!

Yes, it would be nice for them to mitigate that.

ya they really shot themselves in the foot with this one

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 :)

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

$0.07 per second for 720p video.

They built a youtube-immolation machine - but to what end?

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.

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.

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'

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."

Omni is a video model.

They already have Veo

I'd also love to see Gemini 4 Flash

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.

DeepMind would be a good name for it!

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.

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.

> 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?