Google Gemini - The Good, Bad and Ugly

Google Gemini was released last week, with Gemini Advanced supposedly matching ChatGPT in terms of both performance and price

Author

Ate A Pi
February 15, 2024

đź”· Subscribe to get breakdowns of the most important developments in AI in your inbox every morning.

Google Gemini was released last week, with Gemini Advanced supposedly matching ChatGPT in terms of both performance and price ($19 per month) The roundup of reviews is here.

According to Gavin Baker, this is an absolutely classic Google move: “If you are subscribed to their most expensive [Google One] subscription plan and want access to their latest Gemini LLM, you have to pay them less money.” Google One, recently crossed 100 million customers.. meaning it will not be killed by Google, for a while, at least.

Google One subscription plans

Should you switch from ChatGPT?

This is the big question in every AI user’s mind.

For Nick Dobos, creator of the Grimoire coding GPT, the answer is no:

- a lazy coder

Peculiar that both GPT and gemini are running into this. Gemini seems worse. Particularly because it refuses to fix it and fill in

-double check response, modify response, see drafts, and try again without extensions, are very intriguing and nice touches

-still randomly refuses to do simple tasks...

Absolutely infuriating experience. It can draw a goblin, but a goblin with a sword is impossible apparently. Can't draw images, even though it did that 2 minutes ago

-really really bad at conversation turns.

often ignores instructions, repeats patterns, refuses to do things. Consistently takes things in super broad contexts and basically forgets what we were talking about. After writing incomplete code, I asked for "all code" and it gave me a disclaimer that it cant write all code in the universe...

-extremely disclaimer heavy. more annoying that GPT4 by far. But probably a good idea given their huge customer base.

-being able to access email and docs is nice, but kinda broken because it assumes I have 1 google account. But I have like 5 google emails, and I'm not signing up both my work and personal for 20/mo

-editing your prompt destroys chat history. No forking 2/3 chats to arrow through.

-generate more images button doesnt work half the time

-hate that it pulls in my location. with no option to turn off

-fast, but the load anim is weird. I don't like that it scrolls my message to the top after entering. (tbh I hate the aesthetics of Google's material design in general.)

-left bar makes no sense. Why is there a drop down button when theres plenty of room to show my history?

-image quality is hit or miss. Far behind midjourney, dalle & playground. Especially faces. Gets progressively worse as you ask for changes.

---

Overall:

Decent release,

Feels far behind GPT-4 imo

Uninspired. Nothing inherently new. Playing catch up.

Except perhaps the double check search? which feels like table stakes for GOOGLE.

Gonna keep playing with it, but as it stands after 30 mins of testing, I likely won't sign up for the subscription after the free trial is up.

Might make more sense for people with lots of google docs?

By far my biggest issue is it randomly decides it can't help with things sometimes, when it clearly can. I would much rather it try and fail, then just say "I cant do that"

However, for the first (?) time, Google is building in public, allowing the team lead to interact on Twitter with the hoi polloi:

which means things do get fixed eventually:

A welcome change from the usual Google practice of orphaning products as their PMs get promoted.

Become a subscriber for daily breakdowns of what’s happening in the AI world:

Reply

or to participate.