Comment by thimabi
1 day ago
> I find it astonishing that the same company providing free usage of their top models to everybody via AI Studio is nickel-and-diming their actual customers like that.
I agree that’s not a good posture, but it is entirely unsurprising.
Google is probably not profiting from AI Ultra customers either, and grabbing all that sweet usage data from the free tier of AI Studio is what matters most to improve their models.
Giving free access to the best models allows Google to capture market share among the most demanding users, which are precisely the ones that will be charged more in the future. In a certain sense, it’s a great way for Google to use its huge idle server capacity nowadays.
I'm burning well over 10 millions tokens a day on free tier. 99% of the input is freely availzble data, the rest is useless. I never provided any feedback. Sure there is some telemetry, they can have it.
I doubt I'm an isolated case. This Gemini gig will cost Google a lot, they pushed it on all android phones around the globe. I can't wait to see what happens when they have to admit that not many people will pay over 20 bucks for "Ai", and I would pay well over 20 bucks just to see the face of the c suite next year when one dares to explain in simple terms there is absolutely no way to recoup the DC investment and that powering the whole thing will cost the company 10 times that.