It seems ( only seems, because I have not gotten around to test it in any systematic way ) that some variables like context and what the model knows about you may actually influence quality ( or lack thereof ) of the response.
This happens all the time on HN. Before opening this thread, I was expecting that the top comment would be 100% positive about the product or its competitor, and one of the top replies would be exactly the opposite, and sure enough...
I don't know why it is. It's honestly a bit disappointing that the most upvoted comments often have the least nuance.
I can't help but feel that google gives free requests the absolute lowest priority, greatest quantization, cheapest thinking budget, etc.
I pay for gemini and chatGPT and have been pretty hooked on Gemini 3 since launch.
What is better is to build a good set of rules and stick to one and then refine those rules over time as you get more experience using the tool or if the tool evolves and digress from the results you expect.
But, unless you are on a local model you control, you literally can't. Otherwise, good rules will work only as long as the next update allows. I will admit that makes me consider some other options, but those probably shouldn't be 'set and iterate' each time something changes.
On whole, if I compare my AI assistant to a human worker, I get more variance than I would from a human office worker.
For me, "gemini" currently means using this model in the llm.datasette.io cli tool.
openrouter/google/gemini-3-pro-preview
For what anyone else means? If they're equivalent? If Google does something different when you use "Gemini 3" in their browser app vs their cli app vs plans vs api users vs third party api users? No idea to any of the above.
I hate naming in the llm space.
I don't currently subscribe to Gemini but on A.I. Studio's free offering when I upload a non OCR PDF of around 20 pages the software environment's OCR feeds it to the model with greater accuracy than I've seen from any other source.
Just today I asked Claude what year over year inflation was and it gave me 2023 to 2024.
I also thought some sites ban A.I. crawling so if they have the best source on a topic, you won't get it.
In contrast, chatgpt has built their own search engine that performs better in my experience. Except for coding, then I opt for Claude opus 4.5.
Oh I know this from my time at Google. The actual purpose is to do a quick check for known malware and phishing. Of course these days such things are better dealt with by the browser itself in a privacy preserving way (and indeed that’s the case), so it’s unnecessary to reveal to Google which links are clicked. It’s totally fine to manipulate them to make them go directly to the website.
Instead of forwarding model-generated links to https://www.google.com/url?q=[URL], which serves the purpose of malware check and user-facing warning about linking to an external site, Gemini forwards links to https://www.google.com/search?q=[URL], which does... a Google search for the URL, which isn't helpful at all.
Example: https://gemini.google.com/share/3c45f1acdc17
NotebookLM by comparison, does the right thing: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7078d629-4b35-4894-bb...
It's kind of impressive how long this obviously-broken link experience has been sitting in the Gemini app used by millions.
So it seems like ChatGPT does this automatically and internally, instead of using an indirect check like this.
What an understatement. It has me thinking „man, fuck this“ on the daily.
Just today it spontaneously lost an entire 20-30 minutes long thread and it was far from the first time. It basically does it any time you interrupt it in any way. It’s straight up data loss.
It’s kind of a typical Google product in that it feels more like a tech demo than a product.
It has theoretically great tech. I particularly like the idea of voice mode, but it’s noticeably glitchy, breaks spontaneously often and keeps asking annoying questions which you can’t make it stop.
And the UI lack of polish shows up freshly every time a new feature lands too - the "branch in new chat" feature is really finicky still, getting stuck in an unusable state if you twitch your eyebrows at wrong moment.
it's like the client, not the server, is responsible for writing to my conversation history or something
works great for kicking off a request and closing tab or navigating away to another page in my app to do something.
i dont understand why model providers dont build this resilient token streaming into all of their APIs. would be a great feature
Copilot Chat has been perfect in this respect. It's currently GPT 5.0, moving to 5.1 over the next month or so, but at least I've never lost an (even old) conversation since those reside in an Exchange mailbox.
But voice is not a huge traffic funnel. Text is. And the verdict is more or less unanimous at this time. Gemini 3.0 has outdone ChatGPT. I unsubscribed from GPT plus today. I was a happy camper until the last month when I started noticing deplorable bugs.
1. The conversation contexts are getting intertwined.Two months ago, I could ask multiple random queries in a conversation and I would get correct responses but the last couple of weeks, it's been a harrowing experience having to start a new chat window for almost any change in thread topic. 2. I had asked ChatGPT to once treat me as a co-founder and hash out some ideas. Now for every query - I get a 'cofounder type' response. Nothing inherently wrong but annoying as hell. I can live with the other end of the spectrum in which Claude doesn't remember most of the context.
Now that Gemini pro is out, yes the UI lacks polish, you can lose conversations, but the benefits of low latency search and a one year near free subscription is a clincher. I am out of ChatGPT for now, 5.2 or otherwise. I wish them well.
Codex is decent and seemed to be improving (being written in rust helps). Claude code is still the king, but my god they have server and throttling issues.
Mixed bag wherever you go. As model progress slows / flatlines (already has?) I’m sure we’ll see a lot more focus and polish on the interfaces.
That's sometimes me with the CLI. I can't use the Gemini CLI right now on Windows (in the Terminal app), because trying to copy in multiple lines of text for some reason submits them separately and it just breaks the whole thing. OpenCode had the same issue but even worse, it quite after the first line or something and copied the text line by line into the shell, thank fuck I didn't have some text that mentions rm -rf or something.
More info: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/14735#iss...
At the same time, neither Codex CLI, nor Claude Code had that issue (and both even showed shortened representations of copied in text, instead of just dumping the whole thing into the input directly, so I could easily keep writing my prompt).
So right now if I want to use Gemini, I more or less have to use something like KiloCode/RooCode/Cline in VSC which are nice, but might miss out on some more specific tools. Which is a shame, because Gemini is a really nice model, especially when it comes to my language, Latvian, but also your run of the mill software dev tasks.
In comparison, Codex feels quite slow, whereas Claude Code is what I gravitate towards most of the time but even Sonnet 4.5 ends up being expensive when you shuffle around millions of tokens: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46216192 Cerebras Code is nice for quick stuff and the sheer amount of tokens, but in KiloCode/... regularly messes up applying diff based edits.
People who can’t understand that many people actually prefer iOS use this green/blue thing to explain the otherwise incomprehensible (to them) phenomenon of high iOS market share. “Nobody really likes iOS, they just get bullied at school if they don’t use it”.
It’s just “wake up sheeple” dressed up in fake morality.
To posit a scenario: I would expect General Motors to buy some Ford vehicles to test and play around with and use. There's always stuff to learn about what the competition has done (whether right, wrong, or indifferent).
But I also expect the parking lots used by employees at any GM design facility in the world to be mostly full of General Motors products, not Fords.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a62694325/ford-ceo-jim-far...
I think you'd be surprised about the vehicle makeup at Big 3 design facilities.
Disclosure: I work at Apple. And when I was at Google I was shocked by how many iPhones there were.
With Gemini, it will send as soon as I stop to think. No way to disable that.
Opus 4.5 has been a step above both for me, but the usage limits are the worst of the three. I'm seriously considering multiple parallel subscriptions at this point.
Google, if you can find a way to export chats into NotebookLM, that would be even better than the Projects feature of ChatGPT.
Depends, even though Gemini 3 is a bit better than GPT5.1, the quality of the ChatGPT apps themselves (mobile, web) have kept me a subscriber to it.
I think Google needs to not-google themselves into a poor app experience here, because the models are very close and will probably continue to just pass each other in lock step. So the overall product quality and UX will start to matter more.
Same reason I am sticking to Claude Code for coding.
I still find a lot to be annoyed with when it comes to Gemini's UI and its... continuity, I guess is how I would describe it? It feels like it starts breaking apart at the seams a bit in unexpected ways during peak usages including odd context breaks and just general UI problems.
But outside of UI-related complaints, when it is fully operational it performs so much better than ChatGPT for giving actual practical, working answers without having to be so explicit with the prompting that I might as well have just written the code myself.
Not sure how you can access the chat in the directory view.
Google Gemini seems to look at heuristics like whether the author is trustworthy, or an expert in the topic. But more advanced
> Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.
I think the biggest issue OpenAI is facing is the numbers: Google is at the moment a near $4 trillion company. They can splurge a near infinite amount of money to win the race.
Google is so big they they created their own TPUs, which is mindboggling.
Which new user is going to willingly pay an OpenAI subscription once he knows that gemini.google.com gives access to a state of the art model? And Google makes sure to remind users who search that they can "continue the discussion" with Gemini.
Maybe the dirty Altman tricks like cornering the entire RAM market can work but I don't see how they can beat Google by playing fair. OpenAI shall need every single dirty trick in the book, including circular funding / shady deals with NVidia to stay relevant vs the behemoth that Google is.
And how has chatgpt lost when ure not comparing the chatgpt that just came out to the Gemini that just came out? Gemini is just annoying to use.
and Google just benchmaxxed I didn't see any significant difference (paying for both) and the same benchmaxxing probably happening for chatgpt now as well, so in terms of core capabilities I feel stuff has plateaued. more bout overall experience now where Gemini suxx.
I really don't get how "search integration" is a "strength"?? can you give any examples of places where you searched for current info and chatgpt was worse? even so I really don't get how it's a moat enough to say chatgpt has lost. would've understood if you said something like tpu versus GPU moat.
anyway, cancelled my chatgpt subscription.
On the other hand, I can also see why Claude is great for coding, for example. By default it is much more "structured". One can probably change these default personalities with some prompting, and many of the complaints found in this thread about either side are based on the assumption that you can use the same prompt for all models.
Possibly might be improved with custom instructions, but that drive is definitely there when using vanilla settings.
Assuming you meant "leave the app open", I have the same frustration. One of the nice things about the ChatGPT app is you can fire off a req and do something else. I also find Gemini 3 Pro better for general use, though I'm keen to try 5.2 properly
Colouring pages autogenerated for small kids is about as dangerous as the crayons involved.
Not slop, not unhealthy, not bad.
For me both Gemini and ChatGPT (both paid versions Key in Gemini and ChatGPT Plus) give me similiar results in terms of "every day" research. Im sticking with ChatGPT at the moment, as the UI and scaffolding around the model is in my view better at ChatGpt (e.g. you can add more than one picture at once...)
For Software Development, I tested Gemini3 and I was pretty disappointed in comparison to Claude Opus CLI, which is my daily driver.
Also, I would never, ever, trust Google for privacy or sign into a Google account except on YouTube (and clear cookies afterwards to stop them from signing me into fucking Search too).
>OCR is phenomenal
I literally tried to OCR a TYPED document in Gemini today and it mangled it so bad I just transcribed it myself because it would take less time than futzing around with gemini.
> Gemini handles every single one of my uses cases much better and consistently gives better answers.
>coding
I asked it to update a script by removing some redundant logic yesterday. Instead of removing it it just put == all over the place essentially negating but leaving all the code and also removing the actual output.
>Stocks analysis
lol, now I know where my money comes from.
Today I asked it to make a short bit of code to query some info from an API. I needed it to not use the specific function X that is normally used. I added to its instructions "Never use function X" then asked it in the chat to confirm its rules. It then generated code using function X and a word soup explaining how it did not uses function X. Then I copy pasted the line and asked why it used function X and it said more word soup explaining how the function was not there. So yea not so good.
(yes, /s)
Kenya believe it!
Anyway, I’m done here. Abyssinia.