[mixel]

Google seems to really pull ahead in this AI race. For me personally they offer the best deal and although the software is not quiet there compared to openai or anthropic (in regards to 1. web GUI, 2. agent-cli). I hope they can fix that in the future and I think once Gemini 4 or whatever launches we will see a huge leap again

[rubslopes]

I don't understand this sentiment. It may hold true for other LLM use cases (image generation, creative writing, summarizing large texts), but when it comes to coding specifically, Google is *always* behind OpenAI and Anthropic, despite having virtually infinite processing power, money, and being the ones who started this race in the first place.

Until now, I've only ever used Gemini for coding tests. As long as I have access to GPT models or Sonnet/Opus, I never want to use Gemini. Hell, I even prefer Kimi 2.5 over it. I tried it again last week (Gemini Pro 3.0) and, right at the start of the conversation, it made the same mistake it's been making for years: it said "let me just run this command," and then did nothing.

My sentiment is actually the opposite of yours: how is Google *not* winning this race?

[hobofan]

> despite having virtually infinite processing power, money

Just because they have the money doesn't mean that they spend it excessively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized, as they are more concerned with growth at all cost, while Google is more concerned with profitability. Google has the bigger warchest and could just wait until the other two run out of money rather than forcing the growth on that product line in unprofitable means.

Maybe they are also running much closer to their compute limits then the other ones too and their TPUs are already saturated with API usage.

[jeanloolz]

Agreed, also worth pointing out that Google still owns 14% of Anthropic + Anthropic is signing billion dollar scale deals with Google Cloud to train their models on their TPUs. So Claude success indirectly contributes to Google success. The AI race is not only about the frontier models.

[mike97]

> OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized

So does Google, in fact I believe their antigravity limits for Opus and Sonnet for the $20 plan has higher limits than CC $20 plan, and there is no weekly cap or I couldn't get it even with heavy usage, and then you have a separate limit for Gemini cli and for other models from antigravity.

[hobofan]

Is that so? I haven't personally used Antigravity, I just heard a lot of people complaining as recently as ~1 month ago that they hit the rate limits very quickly by e.g. it accidentally reading in too large files.

[eknkc]

I hope they fail.

I honestly do not wish Google to have the best model out there and be forced to use their incomprehensible subscription / billing / project management whatever shit ever again.

I don’t know what their stuff cost. I don’t know why would I use vertex or ai studio. What is included in my subscription what is billed per use.

I pray that whatever they build fails and burns.

[otherme123]

They all suck. OpenAI ignores scanning limits and disabled routes in robots.txt, after a 429 "Too Many Requests" they retry the same url half a dozen of times from different IPs in the next couple of minutes, and they once DoS'ed my small VPS trying to do a full scan of sitemaps.xml in less than one hour, trying and retrying if any endpoint failed.

Google and others at least respects both robots.txt and 429s. They invested years scanning all the internet, so they can now train on what they have stored in their server. OpenAI seems to assume that MY resources are theirs.

[toraway]

For a personal plan to use premium Gemini AI features or for agentic development with Gemini CLI/Antigravity the billing is no more or less complicated then Claude Code or Codex CLI.

You pay for the $20/mo Google AI Pro plan with a credit card via the normal personal billing flow like you would for a Google One plan without any involvement of Google Cloud billing or AI Studio. Authorize in the client with your account and you're good to go.

(With the bundled drive storage on AI Pro I'm just paying a few bucks more than I was before so for me it's my least expensive AI subscription excluding the Z.ai ultra cheap plan).

Or, just like with Anthropic or OpenAI, it's a separate process for billing/credits for an API key targeted at a developer audience. Which I don't need or use for Gemini CLI or Antigravity at all, it's a one step "click link to authorize with your Google Account" and done.

You could decide to use an API key for usage based billing instead (just like you could with Claude Code) but that's entirely unnecessary with a subscription.

Sure, for the API anything involving a hyperscalar cloud is going to have a higher complexity floor with legacy cruft here and there, but for individual subscriptions that's irrelevant and it's pretty much as straightforward of a click and pay flow you'd find anywhere else.

[ionwake]

after using aistudio fine for months suddenly my billing was cancelled and a week later im still waiting for it to be re-enabled.

Im at a total loss to how google can function this way, my only explanation is they somehow have a Philosophers Stone they generate wealth with because they sure as hell make it impossible to give them money.

[dybber]

Eventually the models will be generally be so good that the competition moves from the best model to the best user experience and here I think we can expect others will win, e.g. Microsoft with GitHub and VS Code

[eknkc]

That's my hope but Google has unlimited cash to throw at model development and can basically burn more cash can openai and anthropic combined. Might tip the scale in the long run.