Comment by overfeed
15 days ago
> 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.