For regular consumers, Gemini's AI pro plan is a tough one to beat. The chat quality has gotten much better, I am able to share my plan with a couple more people in my family leading to proper individual chat histories, I get 2 TB of extra storage (which is also sharable), plus some really nice stuff like NotebookLM, which has been amazing for doing research. Veo/Nanobanana are nice bonuses.
It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.
Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.
Gemini also will answer most queries where ChatGpt won't do a lot of things. Example: "Create an image of Snow white". This will give the stand "Violates our content policy" even though the story was written hundreds of years ago. You can even point out the story is in the public domain and it still won't do it.
I strongly advise never using Google's Drive storage. They're known to scan all content, and to disable all access if even a single file is "problematic", often misclassified by a bot. If you do use the storage, do backup all your files, and be ready to lose access at any time, with no way to reach any intelligent human.
I agree with you 100%. We do syncs to another non-google storage account anyway, plus the google accounts are primarily for Android phone usage because photos and videos take up quite a big chunk of space now; they do not have any legitimately important files stored outside of photos sync and phone backups, so there is no deep loss if the account gets banned outside of some inconveniences.
Since we are on the topic of bans & Google, I have a question.
How likely or difficult is it for Google to engage in, for lack of better word, "thought policing"?
You ask your "private" AI assistant to answer a naughty question or help with problematic task(from Google's hidden list) and then you eventually face the ban hammer.
Did anybody ever get banned for searching the wrong keywords?
If Google is smart they'd ban Gemini access while leaving services like Gmail enabled because otherwise customers wouldn't trust them and would avoid Gemini.
I don't think there's any reports of banning from all Google services based on Gemini use.
Through my work I have access to Google's, Anthropic's, and OpenAI's products, and I agree with you, I barely touch OpenAI's models/products for some reason even though I have total freedom to choose.
Do you happen to know if the AI features of the Google One 5TB plan is equivalent to the 2TB AI pro plan? It is so difficult to understand what actually comes with their plans, and I want to have the 5 TB storage for backups.
Yeah it was an absolute nightmare trying to figure out the difference, and I still do not know the correct answer to this, and by the looks of it, neither does Google support, because they were as clueless as I was when I asked them about it.
One thing I read on a reddit thread [1] was that the AI pro 2 TB plan explicitly allows sharing the AI and storage benefits when you enable family sharing on them, while the 5 TB plan doesn't.
However, when I went to sign up, the 5 TB plan wasn't available at all! It's only their lite and basic plans (the one with 30 and 100 GB of storage); the 5TB one only showed up after I signed up for the pro plan, and judging by how the UX looked, you pay an extra amount on top of your AI pro plan.
Now I definitely need family sharing, but I don't need the full 2 TB, let alone 5 TB, so I didn't bother checking further about the 5TB plan.
Also, I am in India, maybe things are different in your region?
If we stop for a while and really consider the value of AI tools, then comparing them on price doesn't make much sense. Any of these tools give hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars of value per month to the user. With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality.
> With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality
Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality". Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are all stochastic machines; they'll give me a different output at different times for the very same query, with differences in quality each time within themselves, let alone other products.
I did my own checks; newer Gemini's output is consistently "good enough" for me and my family now, we individually do not use the full extent of the Pro plan (collectively, we do), and NotebookLM is something which more than one of us uses everyday; Image generation is something we use once a week or so. Given all this, the feature breadth within Gemini covers all bases for us, with a significant catch-up in quality compared to earlier to a point that we don't really need to look elsewhere for now.
Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month. So price is definitely an important point of consideration.
> Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality".
I'm not saying there's any certain answer to which AI has the best quality. That answer depends on the user. For you, Gemini seems to fit the bill very well.
> Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month.
That's not a logical comparison, since those things aren't related in any way. Your utility bill being cheap doesn't make everything else expensive. Some things are just great value, that doesn't mean everything else is not worth it. In that case, you should compare every other purchase and expense with that utility bill, and logically not spend money on anything else.
The same thing is true for a _ton_ of tech products. My home internet plan easily gives me more than $1000 in value per month. My cell phone hardware probably gives me $2000+ in value over even a short 2 year life. Customers still tend to choose the cheapest option that meets requirements.
If AI suddenly became $10k/month or even $1k/month, I would stop using it. It just doesn't provide that much value to me. If it did, I would probably find a way to use local models or some other approach to drive the cost down.
If home internet became $1k/month, I would pay it. $10k, no - I just don't have the cashflow to support that.
If I had to choose one of the three to give up, AI, home internet, or cellphone, I would give up AI. If I had to choose two, I'd give up my cell plan. Home internet is worth a ton of value and dollars to me.
It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.
Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.