You Might Want to Switch to Gemini...

So this week, Google made their move. With Google I/O, they released a bunch of new AI stuff, and the reactions have been mixed. My honest take is, yeah, there's a lot of useful, interesting things, but nothing really groundbreaking. Now, with that being said, they did make some compelling improvements that come along with some real arguments on why you might want to switch from, well, Claude or ChatGPT to Gemini. And my idea with this video was not just showing you every single little thing they released or might be coming in the future, but really focusing on, well, what's available today and what are the real reasons you should be using their product over the competition that is quite good. Let's be real. So we're going to be talking about that and the other most significant releases and updates in the AI space for this week in this show that I call News You Can Use, where me and the team analyze all of the AI releases in the space and we break it down for you once a week, focusing on the ones that actually matter to you as a consumer. Alright, so let's talk about these Google releases and improvements. So across everything they released, there's a lot. But the main story is this new model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. It's the default in Google Search when you go to AI mode now. It's a default in their Gemini product, which is the ChatGPT and Claude competitor. And it's also the default in all their other models under the hood. The benchmarks show that it's as smart as some of the other state-of-the-art models like Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5. But it's a lot faster. Now, user reviews have been mixed. I mean, it's clearly solid. It's clearly good. Nobody's claiming that this is a terrible model. But the main improvement from what I can see so far is really the speed. I can just tell you, we ran a few benchmarks of our own. On most of them, it was just like, I can barely tell the difference versus something like Opus or GPT-5.5, which is a good thing because this thing is way faster. The one example where we could tell a difference is this little game that it made in one prompt. I think it's just a bit more complex than something we've seen out of the other models. Again, this is just a, you know, simple little test. But these 3D objects rotating in space are something that goes a bit beyond what we've seen so far. Other than that, my main takeaway is it's just faster, which enables some of these points that we're about to talk about, starting with the very first thing that would be a reason for you to switch from ChatGPT or Claude to Gemini. And that's as simple as Well, their free offering, their free tier is the best one out of any major AI provider right now. In other words, if you're not paying for a plan, it's, well, the best choice with the most generous access to their product suite. You get the new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. And most importantly, you get more generous usage than Claude that is the most restrictive and ChatGPT that is a bit looser but will cut you off after just a few minutes too. Too. Heck, if you use it for Google Search, it will pretty much never cut you off. Even on a free plan, you can just use AI mode over and over again. Whereas in Claude, well, you know, sometimes you send 3 prompts and you're kind of done for the next few hours on the free plan. So yeah, if you're not paying for an AI subscription, this might be your best choice to actually get work done because it's not going to cut you off. So that's the first point. Secondly, on the other end of the spectrum, when it comes to paying $100 or $200 per month for an AI subscription, well, clearly Google made a very conscious move to make this the best value in the space too. At this point, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all have these $100 and $200 plans that basically just multiply the usage you can get. But with Google's new $100 Ultra plan, it is really quite the sweet value proposition because they just bundle so much into it. Namely, if you pay $100 a month, you don't just get Gemini Pro and the massive usage that comes with that, you also get the YouTube Premium subscription for free. No ads across all of YouTube. That's pretty sweet. You get 20 terabytes of storage and you get 10,000 Flow credits, which is their creative studio for image and video generation, which we'll look at in a second. They also overhauled that. Plus you get Gemini Spark, which is their agentic product within Gemini that is, you know, coming out as early as next week. They're slowly rolling this out. But the headline is you get equally as much usage as the other plans. But this whole bundle that I just went through on top of that, which makes a better value proposition. Okay, but beyond just talking about bang for your buck, what are the actual capabilities that you would go to Google for? There is some, there is some. I mean, they updated a bunch of things. They released some new things. Let's start with the one that a lot of people have been talking about that I personally am a bit underwhelmed with. It's the video understanding and their new video model, Google Omni. It's basically all the features that were scattered across the internet or across different Google apps bundled into one thing. You can input images, audio, or video, or text, and you can output videos. You can apply a whole bunch of presets along the way. And at this point, let me just show you what it looks like. If I head on over to the videos tab, you see all of these presets that I could pick from. And then here on the upload, I could upload, well, anything. And the actually nice thing about this is that it also uses this 3.5 Flash model or kind of the thinking piece of it behind the scenes. So if you want to do something that does take a lot of reasoning, they showed this nice little demo of, hey, generate me a video with an object for each letter in the alphabet. Well, it can do that because in the background, Gemini 3.5 Flash, you know, makes all those words and then it creates prompts for them. And then all of that goes on in the background of this Omni model and you just get the result. So I did a very simple thing here before the video. I picked one of these presets, this party invite right here. I uploaded an image of myself that you can see right here. It's, you know, Gladiator Igor, just something I had lying around as one does. And then I had it create this video. You can judge this for yourself. You are cordially invited AI education party. Join us on November 10th at 7 PM at the Innovation Lab. I mean, to be fair, all I said is an AI education party. I could have given more details, but it did have two little hiccups there in the middle. And this is one of their presets. I mean, usually when they include presets, they train the models literally on examples of these things so they work extra well. And even that's gonna have some hiccups. Look, I'm not bashing it. I'm just saying it's not perfect, just like all of AI video. They just added a bunch of features that were scattered into this product, and now it's really user-friendly. It's really easy to create videos like this. Even if you just go to new chat, you can just click plus and then immediately you go to create videos. Or you could just say, make me a video of a cat with a hat. And then I don't know, at this point, don't ask me why I always use that example. I just do. And then say in my arms. And then just right there from the normal chat, it will be able to create videos. Now that it generated these images, it keeps asking me if it can proceed. I mean, surely they're going to add this over time. But my hope for this product was just do the damn thing. No, just create the whole video, make 5 images, turn them into videos, edit them together, even although I set the agent settings to never confirm. In other words, just do things. It keeps asking me questions. It's a very needy agent right here. And then I get stuck because I need more credits. So this is all you can do on the $20 plan, I suppose. So there we go. We'll have to do some more testing on this. If you're into creative tools, this is the one for you, but you definitely need the $100 subscription. Otherwise, this doesn't make much sense, as you can see. As we're on the note of video generation, another thing they released that is included in the Ultra subscription at the $100 is this Flow product. And I wanted to have a first look together with you at this because this was a product that already a lot of creative and design-oriented friends of mine were using for their work. It was kind of the studio where you upload images and you can create product photography or you can bring certain faces into images. It's really good for any sort of branding and design work. They updated it now with this new Omni model, Gemini 3.5 Flash in the background and more. They express all that as deeper world knowledge. And as you can see, now you can blend even more images than before, different characters, voices, all into one, you kind of just dump it in there. And then it can transform it, restyle it, it has a character reference feature now. And then they also have this agent feature, where really, I've seen this across all the creative tools, it's more experimental than anything. But I think mostly I'm excited to look at these little tools that they ship, because you can even create your own custom tools, they have a way to save yourself and you can tag that with at me. But again, what I really want to check out are these tools in here and the agent feature. So let's start with the agent feature. I'll just add a little image of me and say create a little scene of me traveling the world, teaching people how to use AI on their phones. I'll make sure to add my image to the prompt here. Let's make it a phone format. I don't want to make any decisions along the way. Images we make with the newest Nanabanana model. And then let's pick the best video model as the default. So we get the quality here. And yeah, let's just let this run. It already got stuck. I had to say do it. It's maybe not super autonomous. What do you think of his hat? I think he likes it. So now let's have a quick look at this tools tab. I think this is really interesting. You can see they're really trying to, well, eat Photoshop's lunch here with all these different tools. Look at that. Some of them allow you to create mockups of products. Some of them allow you to edit images. Some of them allow you to create alternative perspectives of the same image. It's just these specific techniques that have proven to work well in other startups. There's companies that do every single one of these things. And now Google is basically recreating them and putting it into their suite of products. This is just how it goes. This is what OpenAI does. It's what Google does. Heck, even Adobe does it with their Adobe Express tools. But yeah, this is kind of neat. You can render sketches, you can mask certain things. So if I go to this one, let's just have a quick look at how this Mask Magic tool would work. And as you can see, this is a Vibe-coded application, which also implies that you can create some of these on your own and share them with the community and that this library is going to be growing. More on that in a second. But yeah, right here, if I take this image of myself and just do smart selection, it just selects all of these layers, cuts me out a bit fuzzy around the edges. But look, it's working on that, I guess. And then it says saved to gallery. Then what has me confused here is the images in the gallery. Well, they're the same images with the same background, right? They're not cut out. So I don't know, I'm not saying it's not working. I'm just saying it doesn't work intuitively and immediately for me. But yeah, I'm sure you could figure this out if you play around a little more. And hey, if you're enjoying this content, make sure to subscribe to the channel. It really helps us out. But now let's look at the next thing that it's actually worth looking at with Google's Gemini. This is a simple one, but a really powerful one. It's video understanding in chat. This is something Google already had, but they just leaned way more into it. And look, I ran this little comparison where I uploaded a 27-minute long video that was over half a gigabyte large into Google Gemini, the new one. And I said, summarize this. And it did it perfectly. Look at that. It looked at it. It was super quick too. This took like a minute. I did the same thing inside of chat. And I was surprised that it could actually do it. It took 9 minutes, it had to use some of its tools, but it summarized this too. By the way, this was a quick announcement video that I recorded and decided not to upload just because I don't think any of these announcements are that groundbreaking. And I changed my opinions on some of this stuff. So I just trashed the video. So here you have a summary of what's new, what I talked about in that video. But the point here being Google is just the best at processing this video, not just the fastest. Then when you look at Claude, it can't process the video at all. So if you want to upload videos and work with videos or audio or other formats. Well, Google is the best at this multimodal thing now. And then the final reason would be stuff that is just arriving or coming in the next few weeks, which is the agentic features. It connects to your Gmail, it connects to your calendar, your tasks, and they have this product called Spark that will be shipping as soon as next week, which can look at your entire Google workspace and then give you insights. Now, yes, this is very similar to connectors inside of ChatGPT or Claude, but it is Google, so maybe they're gonna have a more fluid way of integrating it. We'll be testing that as soon as it comes out and comparing it to the competitors. I mean, just logically, it's Gmail and Google Calendar. Those connectors should work better within Gemini than some of the competitors. No, we'll see. But if you're already in this Google world, Gemini is going to make this most fluid. And they even have a feature called Daily Brief, which will just pull together info from all of these and give you a daily brief once a day. Again, that is just shipping over the coming week. These are the main things where I was like, wow, this really makes a difference versus a lot of their marketing talk where they were pointing at things or highlighting things like anti-gravity to 2, or some agentic features that might be coming in the future in Google Search. That's great. Once they're here, we talk about them on the channel, or AntiGravity, you know, looks interesting, but the user interface is not as clean as some of the competing products. It's just not stuff I will wholeheartedly recommend, or I see people using a lot. Now, to round things out, I want to quickly talk about some other stories in the AI space that I saw over the past week that I wanted to highlight for you. One of them is a whole new ChatGPT ad platform. So up until right now, you needed a direct relationship with OpenAI to advertise with them. But now they released a brand new platform, ads.openai.com, where, well, they're starting to compete with things like Google and Facebook in terms of serving up ads to ChatGPT users. Obviously, I'm not a fan of this, as most consumers aren't. But yeah, it's a thing now. And you can start exploring this. And if you're a small business, it, you know, might be an interesting opportunity over the next weeks or months here to get out in front. I mean, they're just starting, so it's going to be a bit clunky, but this is interesting. A second one is also OpenAI shipping more SynthID features. So this is just a way to track AI-generated images so people don't get fooled as easily. It's basically like an invisible tag embedded in the image. And then another OpenAI story is they had a big breakthrough this week. Mathematically, they solved some problems that were not solvable up until now. There's a 2-minute video here that I recommend watching if you're interested in this, but basically just looked at a bunch of books and papers from the past and solved a problem that humans were struggling with or stuck with for a long time. A real big moment for, you know, AI and the sciences. And I thought I'd highlight that here. Beyond that, as every week, I want to show you all the other stories that we were considering to put into this video that didn't quite make the cut. As you can see, these are the stories we featured. These are the ones that didn't make the cut. And every Friday video, I'll actually show this list. And I'll include the links to these other stories in the description if you want to explore these on your own time. And that's Pretty much everything that I thought was relevant this week. I hope this was interesting, useful, or inspirational to you. My name is Igor, and I hope you have a wonderful day. AI news you can use. Breaking down the stories you actually care about. AI news you can use. Igor's here to help you figure it out.