We use Gemini for some specific tasks. It is often unavailable due to capacity limits or other downtime.

It's probably the best multimodal model I've worked with (if somebody knows a better one for audio analysis, please let me know!)

Don't know, but Gemini 3.1 flash lite is available for free under relatively generous limits, and it had lots of random interruptions like when I was testing it. (Intermittently responding with errors due to high load.)

My curiosity is not the free AI summaries (which they can opaquely tune as necessary), but instead the renting of TPUs to Anthropic and OpenAI. Many of these contracts were announced last minute and seemed to involve a very desperate Anthropic. Based on the Anthropic/xAI data center contract, they’re willing to pay crazy markup to get immediate access to compute.

I want to know how impacted Gemini has been by that, because that will reveal a lot about their margins and revenue generating first party demand. Each MSFT earnings report they discuss the balance they’re dealing with between supplying GPUs to Azure customers and first party demand.

My pet theory is that Gemini is “losing” the LLM race because they’re preferentially selling the TPUs to competitors, while keeping just enough for themselves to stay competitive and build their own products.

I don't know numbers, but their APIs have a bad uptime in my experience for some models. Too often failure because of "traffic too high".

Yeah I had a trial for AI Pro or whatever it's called and could never use Gemini CLI (when it still existed) because it was constantly "overloaded". Using the API directly (wihtout a subscription) sometimes works but the models are so buggy and the endpoints constantly spew errors that it's not usable. See this forum thread for example: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/frequent-503-errors-service-... it started with 503 errors since JANUARY and it's still not fixed. These are "stable" GA models!

I HIGHLY doubt that Gemini is overloaded, Google has been bullshitting with their crap models since release. Waste of everyone's time.

You linked to a comment about someone on the free tier. Someone else mentioned preview.

I use Gemini daily, on a paid basis. Mostly 3.5 Flash Medium. It’s very good for software development, has a great context window, and pricing is about 1/3rd of Claude Opus. I haven’t experienced availability problems except once or twice, certainly no more often than OpenAI or Anthropic.

Seems like the complaints about it are mostly from people moaning about Google not giving them AI for free. Good luck with that.

My complaint was about paid API. It was so bad that not using it anymore.

Rather than direct usage, I suspect a lot of Gemini capacity is being use for the AI summary presented with every google search or AI features of android phones etc.

And I'd expect Google will want to prioritize capacity for those - they don't want their google pixel phone to error or google search to barf.

It's worse than OpenAI or Anthropic. However their lower tier consumer offerings can sometimes be had for <$10/mo on offer and come bundled with other Google services like cloud storage.