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Comment by wcarss | Hacker News Reader

Google has killed so many amazing businesses -- entire industries, even, by giving people something expensive for free until the competition dies, and then they enshittify hard.

It's cool to have access to it, but please be careful not to mistake corporate loss leaders for authentic products.

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It's not free. And it's legit one of the best models. And it was a Google employee who was among the authors of the paper that's most recognized as kicking all this off. They give somewhat limited access in AIStudio (I have only hit the limits via API access, so I don't know what the chat UI limits are.) Don't they all do this? Maybe harder limits and no free API access. But I think most people don't even know about AIStudio.

True. They are ONLY good when they have competition. The sense of complacency that creeps in is so obvious as a customer.

To this day, the Google Home (or is it called Nest now?) speaker is the only physical product i've ever owned where it lost features over time. I used to be able to play the audio of a Youtube video (like a podcast) through it, but then Google decided that it was very very important that I only be able to play a Youtube video through a device with a screen, because it is imperative that I see a still image when I play a longform history podcast.

Obviously, this is a silly and highly specific example, but it is emblematic of how they neglect or enshittify massive swathes of their products as soon as the executive team loses interest and puts their A team on some shiny new object.

The experience on Sonos is terrible. There are countless examples of people sinking 1000s of dollars into Sonos ecosystem, and the new app update has rendered them useless.

It's mostly fixed now (5 room Sonos setup here). It's also a lot better at not dropping speakers off its network

I'm experiencing the same problem with my Google Home ecosystem. One day I can turn off the living room lights with the simple phrase "Turn off Living Room Lights," and then randomly for two straight days it doesn't understand my command

Preach it my friend. For years on the Google Home Hub (or Nest Hub or whatever) I could tell it to "favorite my photo" of what is on the screen. This allowed me to incrementally build a great list of my favorite photos on Google Photos and added a ton of value to my life. At some point that broke, and now it just says, "Sorry, I can't do that yet". Infuriating

The usage limit for experimental gets used up pretty fast in a vibe-coding situation. I found myself setting up an API account with billing enabled just to keep going.

(Public) corporate loss leaders? Cause they are all likely corporate.

Also, Anthropic is also subsidizing queries, no? The new “5x” plan illustrative of this?

No doubt anthropic’s chat ux is the best right now, but it isn’t so far ahead on that or holding some UX moat that I can tell.

How would I know if it’s useful to me without being able to trial it?

Googles previous approach (Pro models available only to Gemini Advanced subscribers, and Advanced trials can’t be stacked with Google One paid storage, or rather they convert the already paid storage portion to a paid, much shorter Advanced subscription!) was mind-bogglingly stupid.

Having a free tier on all models is the reasonable option here.

In this case, Google is a large investor in Anthropic.

I agree that giving away access to expensive models long term is not a good idea on several fronts. Personally, I subscribe to Gemini Advanced and I pay for using the Gemini APIs.

EDIT: a very good deal, at $10/month is https://apps.abacus.ai/chatllm/ that gives you access to almost all commercial models as well as the best open weight models. I have never come close at all to using my monthly credits with them. If you like to experiment with many models the service is a lot of fun.

The problem with tools like this is that somewhere in the chain between you and the LLM are token reducing “features”. Whether it’s the system prompt, a cheaper LLM middleman, or some other cost saving measure.

You’ll never know what that something is. For me, I can’t help but think that I’m getting an inferior service.

You can self host something like https://big-agi.com/ and grab your own keys from various providers. You end up with the above, but without the pitfalls you mentioned.

BIG-AI does look cool, and supports a different use case. ABACUS.AI takes your $10/month and gives you credits that go towards their costs of using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc. Use of smaller open models use very few credits.

The also support an application development framework that looks interesting but I have never used it.

You might be correct about cost savings techniques in their processing pipeline. But they also add functionality: they bake web search into all models which is convenient. I have no affiliation with ABACUS.AI, I am just a happy customer. They currently let me play with 25 models.

If anyone from Kagi is on, I'd love to know, does Kagi do that?

Just look at Chrome to see the bard/gemini's future. HN folks didn't care about Chrome then but cry about Google's increasingly hostile development of Chrome.

Look at Android.

HN behaviour is more like a kid who sees the candy, wants the candy and eats as much as it can without worrying about the damaging effect that sugar will have on their health. Then, the diabetes diagnosis arrives and they complain

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