alt Hacker News> when it was really just Google falling behind the same way it did with Tensorflow, Angular and GCP
Not sure I agree. Angular fell behind in popularity but was (is? unsure atm) still eminently usable. I gave gemini a test drive recently and it was horrendous, as in "picking dirt cheap Chinese model over gemini any day" bad, and with overzealous guardrails to boot. 3.1 pro feels a year behind and is extremely lazy. 3.5 flash feels like a model you’d run on your 128gb macbook, not something that was released a month ago and which costs a fair bit when used through api.
In any case: as of right now I think that we went from a three horse race to anthropic / openai as premium choices vs whatever is the Chinese fotm for a fraction of the cost. 3.5 pro better be a miracle if google wants to hang out with the big boys, otherwise their only strategy is hoping that both US labs go broke and they remain the last man standing.
Gemini is more than fine as a mobile application, and will be the “brains” of the currently braindead Siri, between than and Android it’s hard to come up with an argument they are behind.
Likewise, Gemma4 models are unbeatable at their size.
So I use Gemini for coding? Hell no, but that’s not the same as Google failing writ large.
Googles only real goal is to retain the ownership and dominance of the online world they have now, and Gemini is doing exactly what it needs to do