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Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

discuss.ai.google.dev

701–710 of 752 posts

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now a business shouldn’t be able to borrow money either to start a new initiative? Should they have instead charged customers enough from day one to fund growth? So the first 1000 or so customers should have been charged enough so they could spend an extra $16 Billion?

If they're using their overwhelming size to lock out smaller competitors that can't put up a similar collateral? Probably a good idea. And it looks like Netflix simply needed to make the service a bit more expensive?

A “bit” more expensive to cover $16 billion of expenses?

So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing? Were they going to charge their first 10,000 customers $100,000 a year so they could fund development without either borrowing money or take it from existing businesses?

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a massive fuckup on Google's part and they are taking it out on their customers as per usual. It's not hard to define a quota system and enforce it. If the quota is too high then reduce the quota. If people are abusing the quota with automated requests then detect that and rate limit those users. If I'm paying $200+ a month I should be able to saturate Google with requests. It's up to Google to enforce t…

> If I'm paying $200+ a month I should be able to saturate Google with requests Says who? You? The customer? Who always wants a lower price?

I specifically said that they don't have to fulfil the requests, just that they should be able to accept the requests. Throttling and rate limiting are valid ways to respond to having too many requests. Banning your paying customers' accounts because they sent too many requests is an insane way to deal with having too many requests.

Most companies want to make money. They would use this opportunity to upsell these high value customers to a more expensive plan with higher limits.

Google, which has some kind of dutch disease from making too much easy money from advertising, sees people trying to give them large amounts of money and thinks "How dare they attempt to buy our services? They're getting banned!"

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#703
post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you rely on some Reddit consensus when you can just open Gemini CLI and enter /stats to get the confirmation that you get 200 Pro requests per 24h, and the counter starts when you do your first request. Unless there is something I'm missing

If it was a daily quota issue, I would have been notified and unable to use more Pro requests until the 24hr period had reset. This was a temporary rate limit and it told me to try again at a specified time which wasn’t far away. That’s different. However, it could have been because of a temporary capacity issue. I hope so.

i stopped using gemini altogether for a bit because it was continuously getting capacity issues every evening.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it should be “This is your first and final warning. The next time we catch you, it’s a ban.”. People are building their lives around this stuff and kneejerk bans erode good faith in your platform. This is actually the soft-touch approach: the users of these vibe-coded products need to understand that they are delegating their authority to the tool to work on their behalf. In this case, they delegated to a tool…

Except it's expressly NOT against the TOS of codex to use it via oAuth with Openclaw (the jury is currently out re Anthropic)

The difference is ChatGPT Pro/Plus plans have one shared pool of token limits shared across all use cases.

In contrast Google's AI plans give you at least three seperate pools of token usage limits: Gemini App + Antigravity/Other Code Assist tools like Android Studio + AI Studio free usage limits.

Google limit the context of where you can use their tokens but in exchange they give you substantially more.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#705

So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining . Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game. Then someone shares the exploit with a bunch of script kiddies, they exploit it to the Nth degree, and the company immediately notices and shuts everyone down. Like, my dudes, what did you think was going to happen? You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiou…

> You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points. It's the same with vulnerabilities in slot machines. Damn rare but they exist - in 2014, when I worked in that industry, one gang made a…

Back in maybe 2017 there was a YC startup called Audm that hired professional audiobook narrators to read magazine articles. I found them through their embeds in The New Yorker. The app was pretty mediocre and I wanted to use it in my podcast app, so I started writing a scraper. Very quickly I realized that the page embeds were making calls directly to their production database with no authentication whatsoever. So I pivoted to dumping the entire archive, hosting it on my LAN, and serving it as RSS over my VPN. It was cool, and I found that articles from some publications would post as much as 2 weeks before publication. Eventually they were bought by the NYTimes, and in 2020 they either set up permissions or moved the infrastructure. I gave up on the project, and I understand that most of the content is no longer available. I unfortunately lost my archive with a lot of data when my storage array died a couple of years later. I think the product space got commoditized very quickly by AI readers (none of which, to my ear, are as engaging as the human professionals). I think maybe 4 other people knew about my project when it existed.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're using their overwhelming size to lock out smaller competitors that can't put up a similar collateral? Probably a good idea. And it looks like Netflix simply needed to make the service a bit more expensive?

A “bit” more expensive to cover $16 billion of expenses? So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing? Were they going to charge their first 10,000 customers $100,000 a year so they could fund development without either borrowing money or take it from existing businesses?

Yes? Netflix had 20 million subscribers in 2010. At additional $50 per year per subscriber, that's $1B a year. More than enough to be profitable with regular loan financing at market rates.

> So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing?

By borrowing at market rates and pricing services to cover the loan payments.

You're actually making a good argument why cross-financing should not exist at all and that we all would probably be better without it.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#707
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining. Google's monopoly is not in AI, it's advertisement. When you accuse them of ridiculous and unfounded crimes, you're diluting the chance of Google being held accountable. As someone that wants to see Google ripped apart by the FTC, we can't just lie and say everything Google does is criminal.

the monopoly here is on web indexing, isnt it?

Nope. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Kagi all have more-or-less complete indices. There's no moat around scraping the public Web.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#709
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the monopoly here is on web indexing, isnt it?

Nope. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Kagi all have more-or-less complete indices. There's no moat around scraping the public Web.

Ddg has a miniscule index, and that exists mainly just to say they have one.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#710
post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fondly remember finding and exploiting a buggy slot machine on the night the Euro got introduced. A classmate (I never played slot machines) made some money but didn't understand what was going on. I observed and it became apparent (in my slightly intoxicated state) the machine would pay out 2 Euro coins where is should pay out 20 cents. And when playing a 1 Euro game, you would often "win" 80 cents. Pay-out immedi…

How did something like this not pass a Monte Carlo simulation, which I'd assume they'd conduct in an audit?

Someone misconfigured or misfilled the coin hoppers most likely.
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