Free! Does Google Do Anything for Free?
April 7, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby sharing an observation about younger managers and their innocence.
What an inducement! Such a deal!
How excited was I to read this headline:
Gemini 2.5 Pro Is Google’s Most Powerful AI Model and It’s Already Free
The write up explains:
Google points to several benchmark tests that show the prowess of Gemini 2.5 Pro. At the time of writing it tops the LMArena leaderboard, where users give ratings on responses from dozens of AI chatbots. It also scores 18.8 percent on the Humanity’s Last Exam test—which measures human knowledge and reasoning—narrowly edging out rival models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
As a dinobaby, I understand this reveal is quantumly supreme. Google is not only the best. The “free” approach puts everyone on notice that Google is not interested in money. Google is interested in…. Well, frankly, I am not sure.
Thanks, You.com. Good enough. I have to pay to get this type of smart art.
Possible answers include: [a] publicity to deal with the PR tsunami the OpenAI Ghibli capability splashed across my newsfeeds, [b] a response to the Chinese open source alternatives from eCommerce outfits and mysterious venture capital firms, [c] Google’s tacit admission that its best card is the joker that allows free access to the game, [d] an unimaginative response to a competitive environment less and less Google centric each day.
Pick one.
The write up reports:
The frenetic pace of AI development shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, and we can expect more Gemini 2.5 models to appear in the near future. “As always, we welcome feedback so we can continue to improve Gemini’s impressive new abilities at a rapid pace, all with the goal of making our AI more helpful,” says Koray Kavukcuoglu, from Google’s DeepMind AI lab.
The question is, “Have the low-hanging AI goodies been harvested?”
I find that models are becoming less distinctive. One of my team handed me two sheets of paper. On one was a paragraph from our locally installed Deepseek. The other was a sheet of paper of an answer from You.com’s “smart” option.
My response was, “So?” I could not tell which model produced what because the person whom I pay had removed the idiosyncratic formatting of the Deepseek output and the equally distinctive outputting from You.com’s Smart option.
My team member asked, “Which do you prefer?”
I said, “Get Whitney to create one write up and input our approach to the topic.”
Both were okay; neither was good enough to use as handed to me.
Good enough. The AI systems reached “good enough” last year. Since then, not much change except increasing similarity.
Free is about right. What’s next? Paying people to use Bing Google?
Now to answer the headline question, “Does Google do anything for free?” My answer: Only when the walls are closing in.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2025
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