this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now.
Flash-lite is pretty capable and getting that entirely for free is not a bad deal at all.
It was always obvious Google couldn't keep letting non-paying users use Flash and Pro.
I'm not a fan of how they bundled their plans but they're not too bad especially when shared with a family. I think I've got almost 1TB of Google Photos at this point.
This is a much better page than TFA: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/17004136
Also this is the Flash-Lite model, which they specifically don't want you to pay for.
I mean, sure you can blame Google Maps, but it wasn't my choice to consult Google Maps.
I think noticeable here is how hard it is to steer this trash model even when fed already correct information.
I asked "why closed?" and it corrected me to "it's open" with wrong information. Then it got the current time wrong.
Okay but isn't that obvious that's what would happen? Like even if you ask a human, that's where they will consult and if it shows its open, it doesn't really have any incentive to question the validity of the data.
But more so, it is on the management of the place as well that they have a Google My Business Page but do not update it. If they say its open, why would Google Maps mark it as closed? If it's marked as open on Google Maps, why would Gemini Flash Lite refute that?
Blaming the LLM for this makes little sense imo. Sure it's a dumb model but in this case, it was set up to lose.
1. Open on Google Maps?
2. Validate no extra notices posted on their public website
Even the fact that there is are special notices sometimes posted on their public website is something a model could have been trained to understand, same as a human being.
Because model providers have no moat, and the price of inference is quite large compared to just search, providing it for free makes no sense.
Right now, the goal of the free chatgpt and claude tiers is to accustom more people to AI, to create a new market, not to capture customers.
This strategy makes sense for start-ups with a lot of funding, but not for companies that need to be profitable. Apart from google, no large company is providing free inference to their large models in a consumer app (apart from meta maybe).
That's how much advertisers pay, on average, per user, and therefore how much you pay extra per month for things. Because otherwise the advertisers wouldn't have the money to buy this.
There might be a connection
Personally, I've been using the free plan quite a lot and never hit a rate limit, but noticed the quality dropping. Pro was almost never available. Perhaps they aren't able to deliver a good quality Flash model to free users.
Did we forget what Flash was meant for? I have tried Flash-lite, in my tests, almost all the recent models we have today are good and enough for most daily tasks.
Flash-lite is one of the few models available that is easy to notice its flaws. Its good to summarize data (for example search results), that’s it.
Flash-Lite is closer to what Flash originally was, both in terms of the pricing and the intelligence level compared to other models in the same generation.
gemini.google.com/app runs a mixture of 3.1 and 3.6 while 3.8 is in aistudio
Really would have thought there is an incentive to move everything to one model generation to get scaling efficiency
What should be illegal is to try to get customers by letting it use for free or at a low price and the jack up prices
OpenAI cancelling the $200/20x and then introducing the $500/25x was basically the canary in the coal mine.
I am looking forward to the 2026 numbers from Anthropic in preperation for their IPO, because that's where the really big numbers are going to be.
I've always hated "free" because it sucks the oxygen away from good ideas and redirects money to people who have the connections to get zero risk loans (with no responsibility to pay the principal if things go bad).
Over the past ~20 years we have benefited from VCs valuing growth and distant payoffs, in part because discount rates were low. Now investors have a preference for nearer term profitability (higher discount rates), thus prices are increasing.
If the free stuff is subsidised by ads: noo advertisements are bad!!