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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

Was this written by an LLM? It's pretty bad copy. Maybe they laid off their copywriting team...?

> "Now millions of developers are building with Gemini. And it’s helping us reimagine all of our products — including all 7 of them with 2 billion users — and to create new ones"

and

> "We’re getting 2.0 into the hands of developers and trusted testers today. And we’re working quickly to get it into our products, leading with Gemini and Search. Starting today our Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental model will be available to all Gemini users."

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Sorry, what's wrong with these phrases?

It reads like a transcribed speech. You can picture this being read from a teleprompter at a conference keynote.

Short sentence fact. And aspirational tagline - pause for some metrics - and more. And. Today. And. And. Today.

> all of our products — including all 7 of them

All the products including all the products?

Why did you specifically ignore the remainder of the sentence?

"...all of our products — including all 7 of them with 2 billion users..."

It tells people that 7 of their products have 2b users.

That's not really any better, since "all of our products" already includes the subset that has at least 2B users. "I brought all my shoes, including all my red shoes."

They're pointing out that seven of their products have more than 2 billion users.

"I brought all my shoes, including the pairs that cost over $10,000" is saying something about what shoes you brought, more than "all of them".

Why are they bragging about something completely unrelated in the middle of a sentence about the impact of a piece of technology?

-Hey, are you done packing?

-Yes, I decided I'll bring all my shoes, including the ones that cost over $10,000.

What, they just couldn't help themselves?

The fact that they're using Gemini with even their most important products shows that they trust it.

Again, that's covered by "all our products". Why do we need to be reminded that Google has a lot of users? Someone oblivious to that isn't going to care about this press release.

Scale and cost are defining considerations of LLMs. By saying they're rolling out to billions of users, they're pointing out they're doing something pretty unique and have confidence in a major competitive advantage. Point billions of devices at other high-performing competitors' offerings, and all of them would fall over.

That's not what the sentence says. "Now millions of developers are building with Gemini. And it’s helping us reimagine all of our products — including all 7 of them with 2 billion users — and to create new ones." That does not imply that Gemini will start receiving requests from billions of users. At best it says that they'll start using it in some unspecified way.

>They're pointing out that seven of their products have more than 2 billion users.

More specifically, they are trying to emphasize the point that gemini is being used with seven products with over 2 billion users. However, the above user is right that this was a bafflingly terrible use of English to establish this fact.

That phrasing still sucks, I am neither a native speaker nor a wordsmith but I've worked with professional English writers who could make that look and sound infinitely better.

all of our products, 7 of which have over 2 billion users..

If we are nitpicking, numbers shouldn't be used when using describing the adjective. At least for the small amount of seven.

"including all seven of them with 2 billion users"

The meme of LLM generated content is that it's verbose and formal, not that it's poorly written.

It's why the quoted text is obviously written by a human.

There's no law that says LLM generated text has to bad in a singular way

executive spotted

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