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elisbce 33 seconds ago [-]
Shouldn't it be Google Plus? ;)
dlcarrier 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure my accidental clicks count for some of that. In the results page, they put an "AI Mode" button where the "All" button was, and the font doesn't have serifs on the 'I', so any time I return back from an image or video search, I end up on their Gemini page, because I don't notice the subtle change until I've already clicked on it.
Clearly they meant for people to click on it on accident, because it puts "All" in the second tab, and it otherwise doesn't make any sense to have the default tab be the second one.
The only time I use the Gemini response on purpose is when Cloudflare tells me I'm a bot and won't let me visit a web page, so I ask Gemini to scrape the relevant information for me, because bots are quickly becoming the only thing that can make it paste a Captcha. Sometimes that requires using the 'Show more' button, and it's not clear if that counts, too.
Also, I've heard they've begun rolling out replacing the Android voice assistant with Gemini, so a bunch of people are using it without trying to, even when they'd prefer the voice assistant. From what I've heard, the most common uses for voice assistants are setting reminders and controlling media players, and Gemini is much worse at that than the old Android voice assistant.
HDBaseT 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sure if you make Google Meet appear every time you made a Google query, it would also be the 'fastest-growing product ever'
jamesbaker1 2 hours ago [-]
This comment is exactly what’s wrong with hn. Confidently wrong and at the top of the comment section lol
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
Read the article?
"These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort"
AI Overviews are not accounted for.
Aeolun 59 minutes ago [-]
That seems so impossible that it's absurd. I hear people talking about one thing. ChatGPT, nobody even mentions Gemini. If it's Gemini they're using, nobody is aware it is Gemini, and the only place that happens is on the google search page, not a Gemini app.
Though I guess it's possible all their 1B users are concentrated in India and China and I'd never know.
nylonstrung 3 hours ago [-]
Gemini has gotten wildly worse in recent time, almost incapable of answering a question without a search, lengthy "thinking time" for trivial questions that no doubt is intended to mask waiting for inference resources
edg5000 3 hours ago [-]
Yesterday I read that they sold a lot of TPUs to Anthropic as well as renting them out. This is odd, because I've constantly had issues with Google LLMs not having enough resources. Except for AI suggestions in Search, these work reliably.
aix1 2 hours ago [-]
Google did not sell those TPUs because they had excess capacity. Google sold them because it can make lots more money that way then using them for Gemini inference (the shift to sales is also indicative of some power dynamics within the company).
2 hours ago [-]
esalman 6 hours ago [-]
I was skeptical at first but these days I use Gemini on Android phone and Android Auto, search AI summary, and lately Gemma 4 a lot.
Skepticism is still needed though. The other day I asked Gemini while driving if there's a HoV lane going from 105 E to 110 S. It said yes. Actually there one to 110 N but not S. I did not act upon it because my co-passenger verified that Gemini was wrong.
Search summary is useful but not for things that require deeper technical expertise- those result in bad hallucination.
With corporate crunch on token budget, I've also started avoiding Claude and increasingly using opencode+Gemma 4, and developing some system prompts to iteratively improve the results.
magekinnarus 3 hours ago [-]
This is Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows all over again.
tommica 3 hours ago [-]
So true! Easy to make these kind of claims when you force it in front of everyone.
And its not like it is that good, especially the answers that are sourced from reddit without any vetting. But I still too often go with that damn answer.
vivzkestrel 4 hours ago [-]
- eventually they ll beat both openAI and Anthropic because I can literally hear google saying this in bane's voice
- "Ah so you think data is your ally? you merely scraped data, i was born in it, moulded by it, did not spare a single user until I was already a man"
edg5000 3 hours ago [-]
I've found their models to be weaker and their inference much more unreliable, which is unexpected since they have their own TPUs and you'd think this is something they can handle. But no.
quantified 6 hours ago [-]
If you have entered Gemini to try to figure out how to turn it off, you're also part of the cohort. A blast of gmail messages from Google has announced how it's part of everything and given instructions on how to find out the little you can do about it. Really, nothing.
GuestFAUniverse 1 hours ago [-]
Gemini needed four assisted attempts before it admitted it doesn't know how change a certain setting of a Google product and all answers before were hallucinations.
For me that's ridiculously bad and a waste of time.
They stopped updating the official documentation and there we are: their AI doesn't /know/ anything relevant for their products.
Good luck getting proper help in the present and future.
stubish 20 minutes ago [-]
I stopped using Copilot because it was unable to answer Windows questions, often hallucinating or regurgitating decades old info. I sense a theme here.
faangguyindia 5 hours ago [-]
A company that can't make a dominating coding model well, I've no confidence in its general purpose intelligence model; as a result, I don't ask Gemini anything.
rolph 5 hours ago [-]
what percentage are willing users making a choice to adopt?
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
Somewhat tangential, but when Google doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money and make heavy investment in infrastructure that they rent to those participating in the churn, while still they are "losing the AI race".
But when Apple doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money, and needs to rely on Google for AI services, then this is "the Apple way", "do nothing and still win" uber-pragmatic 5D chess game.
meltyness 5 hours ago [-]
theyre sunsetting the google assistant that can "take me home"
pipeline_peak 4 hours ago [-]
You mean the Ai that unwillingly pops up on my Google searches?
x______________ 3 hours ago [-]
Assuming that's the one, it has given me many wrong answers lately and a sarcastic response calling it out makes it spit out a correct answer.
Pushing it for an explanation on every instance, it says that it ends up not relying on the query of the user to generate the answer. (?)
I've noticed that adding the line "check your answer before answering" gets it to replace English words got Chinese characters..
Funky stuff these flagship products.
edg5000 3 hours ago [-]
Not my experience, I've found it extremely useful for when I need a quick answer. It's handled very specific fairly obscure questions well. I also find it quite consistent.
HDBaseT 3 hours ago [-]
It hallucinates about 50% of the time. [0].
It is completely useless and worse than quantized gpt-oss from over a year ago. It is designed for large scale, instant responses.
I hate when co-wokers or friends say "when I searched it up" and proceed to spew out whatever the Google AI said. I would consider listen if they ran it through ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude but whatever model is used on the search results is just bullshit.
Yeah, for a lot of my Google searches I don’t go past the AI generated summary part anymore. That being said, I do a lot fewer searches now I just ask ChatGPT the vast majority of my queries. I sure as hell haven’t hit page 2 on Google search in a long time.
izacus 2 hours ago [-]
Why are you "assuming" when reading the fscking article would tell you you're wrong?
How about you actually read the topic in question before putting a bitch in?
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
AI Overviews are not accounted for in that number.
stonecharioteer 6 hours ago [-]
Conflated numbers. Show me counts of returning users and session lengths.
GenerocUsername 5 hours ago [-]
Agree. It's just the builtin android and chrome uses blowing up the numbers. By these metrics android assistant and siri had reached these levels in 2015. Gemini has no brand recognition outside of the tech worker sphere
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
My god, do people really lost the ability to read such short article?
No, built-in Android and Chrome are not blowing these numbers.
Clearly they meant for people to click on it on accident, because it puts "All" in the second tab, and it otherwise doesn't make any sense to have the default tab be the second one.
The only time I use the Gemini response on purpose is when Cloudflare tells me I'm a bot and won't let me visit a web page, so I ask Gemini to scrape the relevant information for me, because bots are quickly becoming the only thing that can make it paste a Captcha. Sometimes that requires using the 'Show more' button, and it's not clear if that counts, too.
Also, I've heard they've begun rolling out replacing the Android voice assistant with Gemini, so a bunch of people are using it without trying to, even when they'd prefer the voice assistant. From what I've heard, the most common uses for voice assistants are setting reminders and controlling media players, and Gemini is much worse at that than the old Android voice assistant.
"These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort"
AI Overviews are not accounted for.
Though I guess it's possible all their 1B users are concentrated in India and China and I'd never know.
Skepticism is still needed though. The other day I asked Gemini while driving if there's a HoV lane going from 105 E to 110 S. It said yes. Actually there one to 110 N but not S. I did not act upon it because my co-passenger verified that Gemini was wrong.
Search summary is useful but not for things that require deeper technical expertise- those result in bad hallucination.
With corporate crunch on token budget, I've also started avoiding Claude and increasingly using opencode+Gemma 4, and developing some system prompts to iteratively improve the results.
And its not like it is that good, especially the answers that are sourced from reddit without any vetting. But I still too often go with that damn answer.
- "Ah so you think data is your ally? you merely scraped data, i was born in it, moulded by it, did not spare a single user until I was already a man"
For me that's ridiculously bad and a waste of time.
They stopped updating the official documentation and there we are: their AI doesn't /know/ anything relevant for their products. Good luck getting proper help in the present and future.
But when Apple doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money, and needs to rely on Google for AI services, then this is "the Apple way", "do nothing and still win" uber-pragmatic 5D chess game.
Pushing it for an explanation on every instance, it says that it ends up not relying on the query of the user to generate the answer. (?)
I've noticed that adding the line "check your answer before answering" gets it to replace English words got Chinese characters..
Funky stuff these flagship products.
It is completely useless and worse than quantized gpt-oss from over a year ago. It is designed for large scale, instant responses.
I hate when co-wokers or friends say "when I searched it up" and proceed to spew out whatever the Google AI said. I would consider listen if they ran it through ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude but whatever model is used on the search results is just bullshit.
[0] https://oumi.ai/blog/oumis-study-finds-50-of-ai-overviews
How about you actually read the topic in question before putting a bitch in?
No, built-in Android and Chrome are not blowing these numbers.