Comment by johnb231
6 days ago
That is a preview / beta model with no expectation of stability. Google did nothing wrong there. No one should be using a preview model in production.
6 days ago
That is a preview / beta model with no expectation of stability. Google did nothing wrong there. No one should be using a preview model in production.
Hard disagree. Of course technically they didn't do anything explicitly against the public guidance (the checks and balances would never let them), but naming a model with a date very strongly implies immutability.
It's the same logic of why UB in C/C++ isn't a license to do whatever the compiler wants. We're humans and we operate on implications, common-sense assumptions and trust.
The model is labelled as Preview. There are no guarantees of stability or availability for Preview models. Not intended for production workloads.
https://cloud.google.com/products?hl=en#product-launch-stage...
"At Preview, products or features are ready for testing by customers. Preview offerings are often publicly announced, but are not necessarily feature-complete, and no SLAs or technical support commitments are provided for these. Unless stated otherwise by Google, Preview offerings are intended for use in test environments only. The average Preview stage lasts about six months."
There hasn't been a non-preview Gemini since...November? The previews are the same as everyone else's release cadance, "preview" is just a magic wand that meant the Launchcal (google's internal signoff tool, i.e. "wave will never happen again) needs less signoffs. Then it got to the point date-pinned models were getting swapped in, in the name of doing us a favor, and it's a...novel idea, we can both agree at the least.
I bet someone at Google would be a bit surprised to see someone jumping to legalese to act like this...novelty...is inherently due to the preview status, and based on anything more than a sense that there's no net harm done to us if it costs the same and is better.
I'm not sure they're wrong.
But it also leads to a sort of "nobody knows how anything works because we have 2^N configs and 5 bits" - for instance, 05-06 was also upgraded to 06-05. Except it wasn't, if you sent variable thinking to 05-06 after upgrade it'd fail. (and don't get me started on the 5 different thinking configurations for Gemini 2.5 flash thinking vs. gemini 05-06 vs. 06-05 and 0 thinking)
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There's a very large gulf between "what makes sense to Google" and "what makes sense to Human Beings". I have so many rants about Google's poor treatment of "customers" that they feel like Oracle to me now. Like every time I use them, I'm really just falling prey to my own misguided idea that this time I won't get screwed over.
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