Technologically incredible as in "I cannot believe it's possible for a computer to do this" and not very good as in "these examples are not what was prompted and I can't think of a use case where these would be acceptable".

Imagine someone showing you that they've trained their dog to hold a paintbrush and paint. There would be no contradiction between "this is incredible" and "these paintings suck".

I can see where you are coming from. Vendor lock-in.

Basically spread many AI's everywhere, get people develop/user their ecosystem, and lock them in eventually.

But I find their models' intelligence lacking still.

I don't ever use their built-in gemini features (i have paid gmail) because they don't work well.

e.g. I ask gemini to format my Google docs per Google's material design spec with spacing, etc. It does a real bad job. Many times it does it line by line, and when I finaly get it do it for the whole doc, it does it sloppy, and extremely slow (takes 5 minutes for 10 page doc)

not as good as other chinese openweight models.

At best, good, but not great.

That is the biggest difference here for me. I have not looked at every solution, but many. They are either much more expensive or garbage quality. For example my next target audiobook is a monster 250k words, 1.5m characters, so about $15 here or $75 using elevenlabs (0.05 per 1k characters). For me that is the difference between I will or I won't use it.

Until the end of the year, then double that. And that's only the audi output though the text input shouldn't cost much in comparison.

Official pricing can be seen here: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-3.8-fla...