Comment by ninth_ant

15 days ago

Sure, most all major changes get gradually rolled out.

But you don’t create a broken or confusing experience for the people who haven’t been added to the rollout group yet.

> But you don’t create a broken or confusing experience for the people who haven’t been added to the rollout group yet.

It's an unfortunate downside to conflicting requirements for release-engineering and marketing urgency. In a perfect world, rollout would go from 0-100% instantly, coinciding with the release of marketing material.

In the real world, the trade-offs are either the marketing lands first for some/most people, or delaying marketing is until after rollout reaches, 100%, at which point you're scooped by tech blogs, Twitter AI influencers, and regular media, and immediately lose framing the release from the jump.

  • All you'd need to do would be to make some of the messaging conditional. The page already restricts the dropdown to the older models when Gemini 4 is not accessible so all the information is already client side and they could grey out a box and display a message.

    It is just sheer incompetence that this isn't near the top of their QA checklist.

    Heck, even just a message saying it may not be available for all users yet would go a long way. Instead the way it currently works a lot of people will think they're testing Gemini 4 while they're in fact using Gemini 3.6 Flash and getting awful results.

    • > All you'd need to do would be to make some of the messaging conditional.

      Ah, that's so simple and elegant since the state is in one place -the page - and not in multiple sub-systems and products! Thank you for clearing that up.