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Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

cnbc.com

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Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#11

Post by mden »

symisc_devel wrote: post #6

I do believe this will be the norm from now on to get access to top frontier model. Computing capacity plus state restrictions plus KYC will be imposed to organisations to get access, individuals will be served last on the queue with degraded performance. Once the Chinese models catch up, nobody (at least individuals) will turn back again to frontier labs.

This seems less about frontier models and restriction and more just lack of compute capacity to meet demand. This has always been an issue for large clients running on cloud, though not to this extent.

Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#12

Post by mark_l_watson »

Misleading title on HN but an interesting article, a reminder of why the hyper scalers are investing heavily in infrastructure.

That said, I expect much of the AI bubble to pop. Google Gemini with Antigravity is a good product, as is a Claude Code subscription but I have switched to using DeepSeek v4 Pro with the Claude Code harness and DeepSeek v4 Flash with the OpenCode harness (when I am not using local models with little-coder/pi) and at least for the foreseeable future I don’t think I am going back. Fast APIs at low cost trumps having to spend a little more time to get the same quality of results.

Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#13

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

sarjann wrote: post #9
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #5

It's interesting that Meta is heavily using Google's models (as opposed to Anthropic or OpenAI) given that they are not SOTA for coding. I wonder if this for some strategic/competitive reason, or maybe for cost saving?

Google tends to be very good at vision and smaller/ edge

Hmm ... I was assuming they were using these models for development, but I wonder if any of it might be for production instead - perhaps using vision models to analyze posted content? That would certainly be massive scale, but I'd have thought that scale would require them to be running in their own datacenters.

OTOH, if they are stressing Google's capacity then it seems it has to be for production use, which would relfect a massive failure on Meta's side given their investment in datacenters and AI. If they can't utilize their own models and datacenters, then maybe they should just rent the excess capacity to Google! :)

Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#14

Post by fancyfredbot »

symisc_devel wrote: post #6

I do believe this will be the norm from now on to get access to top frontier model. Computing capacity plus state restrictions plus KYC will be imposed to organisations to get access, individuals will be served last on the queue with degraded performance. Once the Chinese models catch up, nobody (at least individuals) will turn back again to frontier labs.

[dead]

Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#15

Post by dofm »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #5

It's interesting that Meta is heavily using Google's models (as opposed to Anthropic or OpenAI) given that they are not SOTA for coding. I wonder if this for some strategic/competitive reason, or maybe for cost saving?

I would imagine there are many situations within Meta's applications where relatively small models can do a good job — sentiment analysis, abusive language detection, characterising users based on their posts, summarising a user's complaint so it can be ignored more efficiently, assessing whether ads are likely to be fraudulent so they can be run more often, etc.

Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#16

Post by gchamonlive »

londons_explore wrote: post #8
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #3

This seems to be a bit of a misleading headline. In the current climate limiting someone's use of AI might be expected to be about restricting access or restricting what someone can do with it, but the story here ostensibly seems to be about capacity constraints, not any limitation on what models or capabilities Google is giving Meta access to.

These kind of limits happen all the time for big clients. Cloud services like to present the illusion of an infinite amount of compute available at a fixed price per unit, but the reality is if you try to use too much of any service you'll find you have a quota and requests to increase it will fall on deaf ears if the provider doesn't have more of that resource. Too much of my working life has been spent shoehorning…

If you allow me a bit of pedantry, it's infinite "for all intents and purposes". It doesn't mean you can request civilizational levels of compute, but for a blog, a crud, an ETL and such, that is regular use cases with sensible scale you can absorb any elastic demand.

Having said that, I agree with you. You have to request limit increases often and can't scale even in those instances if you don't plan ahead.

Re: Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

#20

Post by microgpt »

gchamonlive wrote: post #16
londons_explore wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kind of limits happen all the time for big clients. Cloud services like to present the illusion of an infinite amount of compute available at a fixed price per unit, but the reality is if you try to use too much of any service you'll find you have a quota and requests to increase it will fall on deaf ears if the provider doesn't have more of that resource. Too much of my working life has been spent shoehorning…

If you allow me a bit of pedantry, it's infinite "for all intents and purposes". It doesn't mean you can request civilizational levels of compute, but for a blog, a crud, an ETL and such, that is regular use cases with sensible scale you can absorb any elastic demand. Having said that, I agree with you. You have to request limit increases often and can't scale even in those instances if you don't plan ahead.

Yeah but you don't need cloud for a blog. Cloud was sold as effectively infinite resources - capacity isn't infinite, or effectively infinite, it's 20% more than you are currently using and you pay 300% more for that.

There has to be a name for this deceptive marketing tactic where you say something is unlimited and then it is only unlimited as long as you don't use very much.

It would be one thing if you occasionally got a "no more capacity" error when requesting large amounts of resources but it doesn't work that way. They confine you to a relatively small amount of resources the entire time you have an account. If you want more you have to request it.

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