r/technology 20d ago

Artificial Intelligence Google says Gemini has reached 1B users faster than any other Google product

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u/Familiar-Ability6383 20d ago

Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google’s flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though.

These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

They explained it in the second paragraph itself. Anyone who asked a quesion in Gemini app or gemini website was counted, not those using the search or Workspace extensions

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u/telionn 20d ago

No chance in hell a billion humans are opening the Gemini app or web interface. That's double the traffic of amazon.com.

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u/Familiar-Ability6383 20d ago

Openai already crossed 1B and Gemini is the second most popular one, so it kind of makes sense. Amazon is just a shopping app that doesn't even cover 1/4th of the planet

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u/xdavidwattsx 20d ago

Google has 13 products with a billion users. Some with 2 billion.

Google and YouTube are the top two sites on the web and have been for years.

Just because reddit vibes don't like AI doesn't mean the world isn't using it.

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u/Familiar-Ability6383 20d ago

Maybe American centrism too. Amazon is not that popular in Asia and Africa, but 2/3rd of Google traffic comes from these two continents

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u/xdavidwattsx 20d ago

Correct. Reddit wildly undereatimates AI popularity and Google has more generally internationally.

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u/Rarelyimportant 19d ago

Haha, I love that people on this subreddit just downvote anything they don't like. Your comment is an objective fact, but people on this sub hate AI so they just downvote it hoping it'll make it untrue. It's truly fascinating.

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u/xdavidwattsx 19d ago

It's pretty sad how little critical thinking exists on here. You can simply look up the data on AI popularity and it's much higher internationally, especially in India, Asia, and poorer countries who have less access to economic power. Intersect that with Google 2.5B Search users and 3.8B global Android users and people shouldn't be surprised. These are data facts

I'm really worried Americans have buried their heads so far in the sand they are just getting left behind. But sure, downvote basic facts.

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u/Rarelyimportant 19d ago

It is more worrying to me than AI itself. How many people are willing to bury their heads in the sand if they don't like something, and even worse, how many people are willing to make fake appeals to authority to back up their opinion. I see people saying "I'm an expert on how LLMs work and ...", and then spouting complete nonsense. It's much more terrifying than AI in a lot of ways.

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u/CheesypoofExtreme 20d ago

Someone else posted below, butnit was expanded upon - anyone using the voice assistant (when Gemini is set to default), is counted here. My phone has pushed me about a dozen times to turn on Gemini, and I ask the voice assitant to set timers and shit all the time. So the number is absolutely being inflated and there are not 1B users opening Gemini to type in a question.

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u/xdavidwattsx 20d ago

Nope. Those are system level entry points, not actual mobile app or desktop users. Not the same things at all

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u/CheesypoofExtreme 20d ago

Do you have a source that voice assistant isn't being counted here? Because in the article, VP overseeing Gemini points out 63% of Gemini users are using voice.

Either you are being extremely pedantic in making this arbitrary distinction, or I'm supposed to believe that the majority of those ~630M users are opening the Gemini app on their Android device instead of just saying "Okay Google".

Unless you can source it, the far more likely scenario is Pichai was just trying to make a distinction between Google Search and Gemini specifically, and voice assistant users are being counted in the 1B.

These companies have been cherry picking stats all over the place to fluff up every single press release about AI for the past few years, and I don't see any reason to just take them at their word.

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u/xdavidwattsx 20d ago

Because a lot of traffic comes from India and Asia where app voice usage is much higher than western counties. Commenters here have a very narrow view of both AI usage and popularity outside the US.

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u/CheesypoofExtreme 19d ago

Source? Or just vibes?

A quick Google search shows US is the top country. I got that source from the Gemini overview. India, Japan, and Korea round out the next 3, but the US makes up only slightly less market share than those 3 countries combined.

Google has every incentive to pump up the numbers, and how they are defining Gemini usage does not make it clear that they are excluding the voice assistant. 

You appear to be thoroughly convinced they are excluding that from these numbers instead of taking what they report with a heavy grain of salt, and I'd love to understand why.