Last week I awoke to Google deciding I hadn't had enough AI shoved down my throat. With no warning they decided to take the previously $20/user/month Gemini add-on and make it "free" and on by default. If that wasn't bad enough, they also decided to remove my ability as an admin to turn it off. Despite me hitting all the Off buttons I could find:
Users were still seeing giant Gemini chat windows, advertisements and harassment to try out Gemini.
This situation is especially frustrating because we had already evaluated Gemini. I sat through sales calls, read the documentation, and tested it extensively. Our conclusion? It’s a bad service, inferior to everything on the market including free LLMs. Yet, now, to disable Gemini, I’m left with two unappealing options:
- upgrade my account to the next tier up and pay Google more money for less AI garbage.
- Beg customer service to turn it off, after enduring misleading responses from several Google sources who claimed it wasn’t possible.
Taking how I feel about AI out of the equation, this is one of the most desperate and pathetic things I've ever seen a company do. Nobody was willing to pay you for your AI so, after wasting billions making it, you decide to force enable it and raise the overall price of Google Workspaces, a platform companies cannot easily migrate off of. Suddenly we've repriced AI from $20/user/month to "we hope this will help smooth over us raising the price by $2/user/month".
Plus, we know that Google knew I wouldn't like this because they didn't tell me they were going to do it. They didn't update their docs when they did it, meaning all my help documentation searching was pointless because they kept pointing me to when Gemini was a per-user subscription, not a UI nightmare that they decided to force everyone to use. Like a bad cook at a dinner party trying to sneak their burned appetizers onto my place, Google clearly understood I didn't want their garbage and decided what I wanted didn't matter.
If it were just Google, I might dismiss this as the result of having a particularly lackluster AI product. But it’s not just Google. Microsoft and Apple seem equally desperate to find anyone who wants these AI features.
Google’s not the only company walking back its AI up-charge: Microsoft announced in November that its own Copilot Pro AI features, which had also previously been a $20 monthly upgrade, would become part of the standard Microsoft 365 subscription. So far, that’s only for the Personal and Family subscriptions, and only in a few places. But these companies all understand that this is their moment to teach people new ways to use their products and win new customers in the process. They’re betting that the cost of rolling out all these AI features to everyone will be worth it in the long run. Source
Despite billions in funding, stealing the output of all humans from all time and being free for consumers to try, not enough users are sufficiently impressed that they are going to work and asking for the premium package. If that isn't bad enough, it also seems that these services are extremely expensive to offer, with even OpenAI's $200 a month Pro subscription losing money.
Watch The Bubble Burst
None of this should be taken to mean "LLMs serve no purpose". LLMs are real tools and they can serve a useful function, in very specific applications. It just doesn't seem like those applications matter enough to normal people to actually pay anyone for them.
Given the enormous cost of building and maintaining these systems, companies were faced with a choice. Apple took its foot off the LLM gas pedal with the following changes in the iOS beta.
- When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta.
- You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.
- On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.
- In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”
- Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.
This is smart, it wasn't working that well and the very public failures are a bad look for any tech company. Microsoft has decided to go pretty much the exact opposite direction and reorganize their entire developer-centric division around AI. Ironically the Amazon Echo teams seems more interested in accuracy than Apple and have committed to getting hallucinations as close to zero as possible. Source
High level though, AI is starting to look a lot like executive vanity. A desperate desire to show investors that your company isn't behind the curve of innovation and, once you have committed financially, doing real reputational harm to some core products in order to be convincing. I never imagined a world where Google would act so irresponsibly with some of the crown jewels of their portfolio of products, but as we saw with Search, they're no longer interested in what users want, even paying users.