> got a pretty excellent pelican for the first two

This suggests you primarily use Safari.

While the bike renders, the pelican doesn’t in Chrome and Firefox.

Probably one of the more serious defects I’ve seen with the pelican. It’s one thing when animated SVGs have bugs, but another when plain ones do.

At $work we still have some places using Opus 4.5. Even places using Qwen 2.5-VL, which is now 18 months old. It works, and upgrading is work (we'd have to validate the new model performs comparable in all the corner cases that currently work just fine)

Those kind of workloads would be hit by an end of introductory pricing. And it's exactly the kind of cases that are not very price sensitive. Where we are price sensitive we track new model releases closely, where we aren't other issues get priority as long as llm performance is good enough

Here's a rendered copy of the pelican I found impressive, for people who don't have Safari: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gemini-3.7-flas...

I think introductory here means more or less permanent but they can't publicly admit there are no takers at a higher price.

Anthropic for instance announced a couple of days ago that they are making Sonnet's 'introductory pricing' permanent https://xcancel.com/claudeai/status/2086891169217122586

Maybe it's a way to kick people off the old models. "If you still want to keep using the old model you can, but you'd better pay a premium."

I work for Google and their free, internal Gemini API isn't quite as graceful. They once turned down a model arbitrarily and it broke our tests. I had to scramble to fix it, then build warning systems for the turndown as well as a special validator to make sure any upgrades make the same determinations.

Yeah, so I'm going to confess. Ive built production AI systems that have very specific jobs, deployed them, and moved on. The cost is not noticeable, i had the system dialed in. Not worth the effort to reevaluate a newer model to see if its better in some way. Current model works, and I have other projects that are more important.

I think in this case its a sign they are subsidizing usage, so it means that the only people left using it in Jan 2027 will be some enterprisy or orphaned workflows which should pay up or migrate off.

I assume so when they release Flash 3.8 or 4.0 or whatever they can claim it's not a price increase?

maybe exactly because the frontier moves, introductory pricing makes sense as you want to free up compute for the newer models

This pelican gave me a good laugh, because there's enough reasoning that the render is out of sight initially. The buildup!

For what it's worth, I use Brave and it didn't render properly in a normal tab, but rendered correctly on a private tab! Underlying engine is Chromium anyway, so make of that what you will.

It's not weird if you're in marketing.

We can be sure that Google is not Pelicanmaxxing their models.