Comment by sdeiley
6 hours ago
People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF.
Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight
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Update:
3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...
You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.
So a lot of these things are relative.
Now if that equation plays out 20K times a day, well that's one thing, but if it's 'once a day' then the cost basis becomes irrelevant. Like the cost of staplers for the Medical Device company.
Obviously it will matter, but for development ... it's probably worth it to pay $300/mo for the best model, when the second best is $0.
For consumer AI, the math will be different ... and that will be a big deal in the long run.
Yeah you’re right but most people in the world do not need an agent that codes.
I think Gemini gives fine answers outside code tasks.
Outside of work, where I use Claude, Gemini is cheaper for me (for what I would use AI for) than both Claude and ChatGPT so Google gets my money.
Right now I'll pay 2x for a subjectively 20+% better coding agent. But in a year I don't think there will be an agent that to me is subjectively 20% better amongst the big three.
That sounds great, but if Opus generates 20% better code think of the ramifications of that on a real world project. Already $100/month gets you a programmer (or maybe even 2 or 3) that can do your work for you. Insanity. Do I even care if there is something 80% as good for 50% the cost? My answer: no. That said, if it is every bit as good, and their benchmarks suggest it is (but proof will be in testing it out), then sure, a 50% cost reduction sounds really nice.
If I was building an application using massive amounts of calls to the api, I’d probably go with Gemini. For a Copilot, definitely Opus.
Gemini is the most paradoxical model because it benchmarks great even in private benchmarks done by regular people, Deep Mind is unquestionably full of capable engineers with incredible skill, and personally Gemini has been great for my day job and my coding for fun (not for profit) endeavors. Switching between it and 4.6 in antigravity and I don't see much of a difference, they both do what I ask.
But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.
People can be and often are wrong.
You'd notice how good Opus is in Claude Code. IMHO CC is the secret sauce
Outside of code, Gemini is really really good.
It's not half price or cost effective if it can't do the job, that I am happy to pay twice the price for to get done.
But I agree: If they can get there (at one point in the past year I felt they were the best choice for agentic coding), their pricing is very interesting. I am optimistic that it would not require them to go up to Opus pricing.
Do they offer a subscription like Claude? These models waste so many tokens "thinking", that using via API is a complete waste of money.
> "People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF."
Google undercutting/subsidizing it's own prices to bite into Anthropic's market share (whilst selling at a loss) doesn't automatically mean Google is effective.
Everybody is subsidizing their prices.
But Flash is 1/8 the cost of sonnet and its not impressive?
Sure, for the launch. Until they start introducing ads, capping existing subscriptions and raising prices (on all products)
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Deepseek is 2% of the cost of Opus. But most people aren't using that for code even tho it's ridiculously cheap.
sonnet 4.6 is a third, and equivalent to opus 4.5, which is enough for me usually :)
EDIT: Gemini does have 1m context for "free" though so that's great.
Attention is the new scarce resource. Saving even 50% is nothing if it wastes more of my time.
The order of priority for most people is: 1\ output quality 2\ latency 3\ cost. I will always pays more money if output quality is significantly better and latency is worth the tradeoff. There's also enough cost optimization strategies for applied AI applications that token cost rarely outweighs unless it's a SIGNIFICANT difference (e.x. 100-200% more).
We are not at the moment where price matters. All that matters is performance.
What did you say? Cant hear you over the $400B in capex spend.
Counterpoint: price will matter before we hit AGI
Why do you believe it has to? Uber took 15 years to show a profit. 15 years from 2022 when chatgpt launched is 2037. That's long enough that to say I don't know if I'll even be alive by then.
It matters to me. I pay for it and I like using it. I pick my models to keep my spend reigned in.
What do you use it for? What is your time worth that you'd settle for a lesser model to save a few bucks?
Any tips for working with Gemini through its chat interface? I’ve worked with ChatGPT and Claude and I’ve generally found them pleasant to work with, but everytime I use Gemini the output is straight dookie
Even though I don't like the privacy implications, make sure you use the option to save and use past chats for context. After a few months of back and forth (hundreds of 'chat' sessions), the responses are much higher quality. It sometimes does 'callbacks' to things discussed in past chats, which are typically awkward non-sequiturs, but it does improve it overall.
When I play with it in 'temporary chat' mode that ignores past chats and personal context directives, the responses are the typical slop littered with emojis, worthless lists, and platitudes/sycophancy. It's as jarring as turning off your adblocker and seeing the garish ad trash everywhere.
make sure you use ai studio (not the vertex one), not the consumer gemini interface. Seems to work better for code there.
It's half the price per token. Not all tokens are generated equally.
Neither are cars but Ill take a Porsche over a Ferrari for a fraction of the price.
What about a Porsche vs. a Toyota Camry for half the price?
which model?
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Some people like blackjack and a technical edge with card counting, others just say screw it and do slot machines.
This is a decent analogy actually. Kudos
While price is definitely important, results are extremely important. Gemini often falls into the 'didn't do' it part of the spectrum, this days Opus almost always does 'good enough'.
Gemini definitely has its merits but for me it just doesn't do what other models can. I vibe-coded an app which recommends me restaurants. The app uses gemini API to make restaurants given bunch of data and prompt.
App itself is vibe-coded with Opus. Gemini didn't cut it.
The binary you draw on models that havent been out a quarter is borderline insane.
Opus is absurdly good in Claude code but theres a lot of use cases Gemini is great at.
I think Google is further behind with the harness than the model
I was careful not to draw binary. I was saying that Opus in Claude Code is good enough for me to make projects. Using Gemini after it seems like a significant downgrade, which actually doesn't get the job done helping me code. This is my experience, it can change if Gemini will get better.
However, for internal use I opt to Gemini, because of API cost. It is great in sorting reviews and menues out.
Well, it’s half if the product is equal.
Is it? Honestly, I still chuckle about black Nazis and the female Indian Popes. That was my first impression of Gemini, and first impressions are hard to break. I used Gemini’s VL (vision) for something and it refused to describe because it assumed it was NSFW imagery, which is was not.
I also question statis as an obvious follow up. Is Gemini equal to Opus? Today? Tomorrow? Has Google led the industry thus far and do I expect them to continue?
Counterpoint to that would be that with natural language input and output, that LLM specific tooling is rare and it is easy to switch around if you commoditize the product backend.
If something is shit, it doesn't matter it costs half price of something okay.
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."
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