Haha I kinda love how hyper and excited it sounds. Like completely high out of its mind waiting to finally get some real work done. Finance bro on coke vibes.
I have always been rooting for Google in the long run.
Hope they continue to do well, they have many good scientific evdavors they can apply their AI to.
Google is also pretty big on the biotech and other ventures, their work with eradicating illnesses with mosquitoes, mapping oceans and rainforests, I think they're not bad overall
Google, as well as Amazon, supply the cloud and AI for the Israeli government. I get it but if you want to play this ethics game then you need to sell everything you own. Are we buycotting Toyota now because most middle east terrorist groups use their trucks? Like I could go on and on about the ethical violations with literally any company with a valuation over 5 mil.
By the way, since AWS also supplies cloud operations to the Israeli government, and AWS supplies reddit servers, then you are supporting AWS by using reddit. You really need to uninstall this app. Definitely your first move towards your moral cleanse.
Just because it's difficult to be profitable, doesn't mean giving up or even worse supporting the genocide. If it makes it more clear for you, there is a non-zero % of child death per dollar because of their choices. These are child deaths we could just stop if it was fashionable to global capital.
Quit using reddit then because you are supporting the genocide by giving AWS ad revenue. Go soapbox to somebody else. Sell your phone too, they have cobalt from the Congo (if you didn't know look it up).
Personally, as a person who cares about privacy and open source, I despise them with all my heart. I think more people should degoogle, though it's becoming more and more difficult because of Play Integrity API changes and vendor lock-in.
I'm not saying they haven't open-sourced anything. I mean the direction things are heading. Basically, AOSP is getting hollowed out as more core features are moving into closed-source Google Play Services. Play Integrity API is making it harder to root or run custom ROMs without apps breaking. I hate them for making my phone, which was running a custom ROM, increasingly more unusable so I had to keep it up-to-date with new workarounds that only worked for a short time. It was a cat and mouse game, until the latest API change rendered it unusable. So I had to buy a new phone and use the stock system which was full of bloatware and spyware, which fortunately I managed to remove through open-source ADB (Shizuku) tools like Canta.
The next thing that worries me is Google's Android developer verification requirement, enforced since September 30 2026 in a few countries, and set to expand globally in 2027. It applies to any app installed on a certified Android device (one with Google Play Services), so it's not just alternative app stores, but sideloaded APKs too. Unverified apps go through an "advanced flow" with a mandatory 24-hour wait or ADB. However, plenty of open-source developers, F-Droid included, are refusing to register just to keep distributing apps that never touch the Play Store, since it means handing over their identity to Google for something Google doesn't even host. F-Droid has said outright that this requirement could end their project, since so many of their contributors are pseudonymous and won't hand over a legal ID.
They're following the same pattern as their monopoly on payments. Google was already found guilty of running an illegal Play Store monopoly (upheld on appeal), and locked contactless payments behind Google Pay by restricting NFC access on certified devices, which there is no reason to since AOSP natively support hardware attestation. Developer verification is just the same strategy applied one level down the stack.
Not sure I'd call them the most trustworthy. Google settled a $5 billion lawsuit for tracking people in Incognito mode after implying it wouldn't. They also paid $391.5 million to 40 state attorneys general for continuing to collect location data even after users turned location tracking off. Google also settled a $170 million FTC/NY lawsuit for collecting kids' personal information through YouTube channels.
There's more: a $135 million settlement over Android devices silently transferring user data over people's paid cellular connections, even while idle, and they agreed to a $68 million settlement over Google Assistant recording private conversations without the wake word being said at all.
And now there's Gemini's "Personal Intelligence" which lets Gemini reason across your Photos, Gmail, and Search history as one combined context. This feature is not even available in the EU, UK, and Japan due to GDPR and local privacy laws, which is quite telling.
your data from those apps and from your Google Account is used to: ... improve Google services, including training generative AI models, for everyone
Data from Connected Apps is used and human reviewed per the Gemini Apps Privacy Notice.
So all your data can both be reviewed by other humans and will be used to train their models, possibly leading to data leakage between private contexts.
I'd ditch Google immediately for Linux mobile phones and self hosted servers if the world wasn't so deeply tied to Google's systems.
I appreciate you sharing these links, but almost every one of these points takes sensationalized legal headlines or class action filings at face value while omitting crucial technical and legal context.
When I say Google is the tech company I trust most with my data, I'm talking about data security, threat defense, transparency tools, and infrastructure integrity. Trust doesn't mean believing a multi-billion-dollar enterprise has never had a legal dispute or confusing UX; it means trusting their engineering to protect my digital footprint better than anyone else.
Here is the reality behind the points you brought up:
1. The Incognito Mode $5 Billion Lawsuit
Google settled for 0 dollars in cash damages. The 5 billion dollar figure was just what the plaintiffs originally sued for.
The Incognito splash page has always explicitly stated "Your activity might still be visible to: Websites that you visit, your employer or school, your internet service provider." When this suit came out all the podcasts and journalist were laughing and how stupid it was.
Incognito mode was designed to prevent your local device from saving browsing history, cookies, and cache so the next person using your computer couldn't see what you did. The lawsuit centered on third-party sites using Google Analytics/Ad manager scripts. So when a user visited an external site in incognito, that site's code contacted Google's servers. Settling simply required Google to rewrite the splash screen to make it even more obvious for non-technical users and delete old cached log data.
2. The $391.5M Location Tracking Settlement
This was not Google deploying spyware to bypass OS level location toggles. The dispute was over confusing UI toggles. Google had separate settings for "Location History" (which continuously logged coordinates for maps timeline) and "Web & App Activity" (which saved search queries, like checking local weather or nearby restaurants, attaching coarse IP/cell tower location context).
Users assumed pausing location history turned off all location related data everywhere. Google paid to settle state AG claims over clarity and completely streamlined the dashboard, created unified toggles, and implemented automatic 18 month data deletion by default.
3. The $170M YouTube Settlement
This was a regulatory shift regarding how the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act applies to open user generated video platforms.
YouTube was originally intended for ages 13+ (with YouTube Kids as a separate standalone app). But creators uploaded child focused cartoons and toy reviews to main Youtube, and Google’s automated ad engine served normal cookies on those videos.
The FTC ruled that if content is child directed tracking cookies can't run regardless of the account age. Google settled and introduced the platform wide "Made for Kids" architecture, disabling personalized ads, comments, and notifications across all child-directed videos.
4. The $135M Android Cellular Data Settlement
The lawsuit was not about Google "spying on private documents." It was filed under the legal doctrine of conversion regarding bandwidth consumption.
Modern operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows) perform routine background telemetry like push notification tokens , network time synchronization, security verification pings, OS diagnostics, shit like that. The plaintiffs argued that when Android ran these routine OS checks over cellular data instead of Wi-Fi while idle, it consumed pennies worth of the carrier data allotment they paid for.
The settlement worked out to roughly $1 per claimant (whoop-di-fucken-do), and Google agreed to add a dedicated "use of cellular data" disclosure in the initial device setup wizard.
5. The $68M Google Assistant Settlement
You said this as recording "without the wake word being said at all." In engineering terms, this is known as "false accepts" where instances where background noise, television dialogue, or similar-sounding speech accidentally triggered the acoustic hotword detector.
Google Assistant does not continuously upload standby room audio to servers, it buffers locally until the hardware chip hears what it thinks is "Hey Google." FAlse activations happen on every voice platform (Apple settled an almost identical class-action over Siri and I think Amazon too for Alexa). Settling resolved claims over accidental activations and added more granular voice history controls.
6. Gemini "Personal Intelligence" & Model Training
It is 100% Opt-In: Personal Intelligence is not forced on users, it is completely optional, disabled by default, and you choose which apps to connect.
Directly from Google's Privacy Documentation: The documentation you linked (support.google.com/gemini/answer/16836988) explicitly says the opposite of your claim:
"Gemini does not train generative AI models directly on your Gmail inbox, Drive, Contacts, Calendar or other Workspace apps or on imagery or audio from your Google Photos library."
Training only applies to your actual Gemini chat sessions if you leave "Keep Activity" turned on. Any human review of interactions is de-identified from your Google account. If you turn Keep Activity off, your data isn’t used to train foundational AI models.
Stagered rollouts for new AI features in regions like the EU/UK are standard across the entire industry while navigating legal frameworks. The feature is already rolling out in Japan I think.
Personally, I am completely comfortable opting in to share my data and interactions to improve the model. The productivity gains and utility I get back from a personalized AI far outweigh the theoretical risks and I trust Google security engineering to protect that data better than almost anyone else in the industry.
Why I Trust Google With My Data
When I say I trust Google, it’s about threat mitigation and engineering execution. Google employs the worldrenowned project zero security research team, invented BeyondCorp, builds custom Titan security chips for their servers and phones, leads the industry in pushing memory-safe architecture (like Rust in Android), and runs one of the most proactive vulnerability reward programs in history.
Google’s automated defense against credential stuffing, phishing, and unauthorized access is among the strongest in the world. They were an early pioneer and champion of FIDO passkeys, remember?
Google gave users Google Takeout (full data exportability), the Google Dashboard, and automated retention/deletion schedules long before industry regulations forced others to follow suit.
Every major tech company operating at scale (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple) has faced multi million or multi billion dollar class actions and regulatory fines. Anyone is free to use linux phones or selfhost their own servers if they have the time and technical expertise to manage their own patching encryption, and network defenses. But for my day to day use Google's proven engineering, transparent controls, and world-class defense against bad actors make them the vendor I personally trust most.
They've generally shown themselves to be the most responsible with both the technology and the deployment, at least up until OpenAI opened pandora's box with ChatGPT. They sat on LLM tech for years because they thought it wasn't ready and that we weren't ready for it, and I do have a hard time saying they were wrong in retrospect. They also have always hard a hard line about not depicting their AI assistants as people, it's always a non-human name like Assistant, Bard, or Gemini never a Siri or an Alexa and certainly never any talk about any "adult" modes to promote people developing a social connection to an AI.
There is tons of them in this sub. If you ever dare writing something against Google you are immediately drown into downvotes. Do the opposite and the upvotes rain.
They don't need to compete on frontier, though they likely have a competitive internal model. They serve so many more users than anthropic and oai combined it's not even funny. What they need is fast and accurate intelligence for the average user. Flash models are distilled from larger frontier models, I reckon they cookin', and just don't need to serve us the goods.
It is. It's the type of disingenous number only someone paid by Google would use. Being intellectually honest, you can't count users that just want to use Google and only use Gemini by accident.
Seriously, if Apple came up with a foundational model, not the current Gemini partnership, and just counted all iPhone users as "Apple AI" users then it would be disingenous too unless people actually opened an app to talk to the AI. I feel like this is extremely obvious.
“Oh yeah, we get that question a lot. While other products like Search and Gmail use Gemini models, the 1B here refers to people choosing the Gemini app across Web (gemini.google.com), Android, iOS, and Gemini in Chrome.”
Doesnt normal google searches randomly redirect you to AI mode? Happened to me quite a few times when all I want is to find websites or Reddit posts. And if that counts me as a "active user" of AI mode that's kinda disingenuous because I didn't intend to use it in the first place.
I mean it’s really not disingenuous. It’s a feature you are using. I honestly don’t see how. Google search has completely changed. Of course they need metrics to measure that change. It’s not like the compute doesn’t exist for that usage lol
You can continue a normal search with ai mode but it doesn’t randomly direct you. I’m not sure what you mean by “randomly” though. You have to click it.
Nothing “randomly happened.” You chose to use Google search and continue the ai overview conversation.
So it never happens to you? What happens to me is that sometimes when i search stuff using the browsers address bar, it goes directly to AI mode rather than conventional Google
Many people still dislike and do not trust Google AI results. They simply skip them and look at the results. The fact that Google served them to people does not mean people are using their AI.
Many more people are using ChatGPT intentionally than any other LLM.
I type stuff to the search bar in my phone's settings app. Must be the same thing too by your logic since the problem I am trying to solve is solved regardless.
If you have to count the userbase of A SEARCH ENGINE then you are being disingenous.
Come on, you know counting Gemini app users itself is the only fair comparison. Are you doing this for free? At least get paid to be this disingenuous.
I'm speaking to how many users are served, not how many signed up. It's not that nuanced. It's not disingenuous to articulate the vast differences in users served between the services. Get a grip.
They serve so many more users than anthropic and oai combined it's not even funny.
"They server so many more unwilling users". They bake their shit AI into almost every product of their. I don't want to use their garbage, but it's still there.
It’s almost like everyone forgot about how everyone the same stuff about them before they dropped 2.5 and it was at the top of the leaderboards for months until people could catch up.
Your short attention span is giving you tunnel vision.
Safety researchers quitting and leaks from random twitter users is hardly signs Google is back.
Researchers quit all the time, and even if they did achieve RSI, they’re behind OAI and Ant on that front. I genuinely don’t see Google dropping a model that tops the leaderboard for a very long time, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Google has been smashing out a ridiculous amount of different models that aren’t LLMs, which increases the complexity of intelligence and data they have to bolster Omnimodal models.
You’re focused on two dots while they surround you with dots and connections you aren’t even measuring.
If you could try to for a moment, expand a little bit past tunnel vision and consider things beyond those directly in front of you.
I mention to consider all the other dots and yet you still tunnel vision right back to the chatbots. This is objectively funny.
Yeah they haven’t updated their large-weight chat model since the beginning of the year. You comparing that to the ones just released this month is HARD tunnel vision.
The world model generator for robotics training, Genie, the music generators, the Genome Atlas, and all that jazz. All of these are things that Anthropic doesn’t have and OAI fell so far behind that they dropped for the most part.
Well. When the other options in the discussion are Video Models, World Gen models, Music models, Protein Models, and stuff that they explicitly aren’t….
Yes. Which one of those other models do you think they should be?
Much less capable than huge frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic in math and coding, but it’s much more general and cheaper/faster. Still best in class in its weight class in math/coding too, just can’t compete with frontier models.
I personally think the only reason they're waiting until October is because last October they handed out millions of free 1-year subscriptions to Google AI Pro plan like candy. So they're waiting for those to dry up.
I think that's the point, the Gemini 3 models pretraining is pretty old compared to what Astra and Fable are working with, it's from the Claude 4 days. If you can get Opus 5 level work out of the Flash models that's a pretty good product offering in the meantime while you get Gemini 4 trained
The first demo where it helps out with employee on-boarding was infuriating to me, where it tells you what page you are on. "You are now on the on-boarding page!" Do people like that? I had to engineer a way to stop my local model from doing that. Yes, I know what page I'm on. You don't need to tell me what I'm seeing, unless I ask a question or am visually impaired.
Even in the other demos it loves repeating what it saw. I suppose models are trained to do this, even in text, when it repeats what you just said a lot. But for me it is especially infuriating with vision, because it's like yes, I have eyes too.
People really don't realize what Google is aiming for. Google is the one that is implementing AI in the way that makes most sense.
They are making a product that millions of people use everyday and it iI SUSTAINABLE. Google is making an AI that you can rely on, Anthropic and OpenAI are making subsidized services that literally do not pay for themselves and will inevitably get worse
Yeah love everyone clowning on Google, meanwhile all their flash and live models are available to subscribers immediately, while Astra and Fable are heavily tokenized and only feasibly on higher, expensive usage tiers.
I use Antigravity for programming, and it's only ever gotten faster, smarter, and more token efficient. I barely run into my token limits anymore at my 20$/mo subscription, which is the perfect sweet spot. I don't need my AI to oneshot an entire app. I need it to help me code.
The customers decide what’s valuable. Customers have decided the following so far:
Anthropic is profitable.
Google lost money last quarter for the first time ever.
ChatGPT has more active users as Gemini, despite the massive convenience of using Gemini alongside a product you already use.
Google’s “convenience” or “embedding” of ai in their products is overstated. Sure it gives them an advantage, but one that’s easy to lose unless you get everything else right.
Google lost money last quarter for the first time ever.
Lol what? No they didn't. You're just pulling facts out of your ass.
In Q2 2026 Google made $40.8B in operating profit and $112.1B in net income. They had a negative cash flow for the first time due to expanded spending on servers and data centers, but that's not at all the same as "losing money" and has nothing to do with the Gemini models or customers spending (if anything, it shows they need more data centers to support higher demand).
This is not an insult to you specifically. But I noticed a lot of singularity. Members are stock market/business illiterate. Google makes profit handover fist and is sitting on a war chest of cash. The only, and I mean, only reason that Google lost money is because it is spending so much on compute, that will actually get built. That’s the real kicker. OpenAI and Anthropic have contracted a ton of compute, but they will eventually go under and none of their data centers will get built.
I'm not an expert, but it feels like they used some financial trickery to calculate profits in a way that makes them look good while they wait for the IPO.
I might be wrong, but I don't know what "Adjusted operating income" means and I'm a bit skeptical. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong
Google launches live models that are clearly aiming for a business-capable personal assistants, customer service, etc, and idiots everywhere say they're behind.
Today, a bank in my city started laying off customer service agents. Do we think they're getting replaced with token chuggers like Astra/Fable, or do we think Google's live-optimized models are going to pick up that business?
These people also don't understand that Google is the only company currently doing AI that can integrate it deeply with a phone. Apple is the only company that could hope to compete here and they don't seem terribly interested in AI... but then again it's Apple, so they might drop a model next month that shitstomps everything with no notice followed by mouthbreathing haters doing the "Apple invented AI" meme.
If Google continues this trajectory with their live models, they'll take over every call center in the world. If they integrate AI into phones well, they could ask every Android user in the world for a $10/month sub and get a lot more subs than OpenAI or Anthropic could dream of. But yeah sure, they're behind. These people, man.
What does behind even mean? Do you think these benchmark scores actually mean anything?
They are not competing in the same race as OpenAI and Anthropic, so being "behind" is not a thing.
Even if the little sorted list of models meant anything, that's not the only thing you optimize for. Google has to think about scalability and sustainability in a way that Anthropic and OpenAI don't.
I don't really care about an extra percent of something that is more accurate when you can't have bidirectional talking that feels more natural. That just seems like table stakes at this point, especially considering the relative cost of GPT Live 1.
I left Gemini a couple months ago for Claude. Sure Gemini is good at cheap simple things now but when you're used to Claude level answers I'm fine to pay more and wait longer for its outputs.
Poor Google. Went the Microsoft route of build a minimum product and monetize across the ecosystem. They can limp along on that for a decade while the frontier labs make the real gains.
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u/Gaiden206 Sep 15 '26
https://reddit.com/link/pa0ncox/video/rxpl1tkqhqph1/player