Sorry I was talking of B2B APIs for my YC startup. Gemini is still far behind for consumers indeed.

I use Gemini almost exclusively as a normal user. What am I missing out on that they are far behind on?

It seems shockingly good and I've watched it get much better up to 2.5 Pro.

Mostly brand recognition and the earlier Geminis had more refusals.

As a consumer, I also really miss the Advanced voice mode of ChatGPT, which is the most transformative tech in my daily life. It's the only frontier model with true audio-to-audio.

> and the earlier Geminis had more refusals.

Its more so that almost every company is running a classifier on their web chat's output.

It isn't actually the model refusing, but rather if the classifier hits a threshold, it'll swap the model's out with "Sorry, let's talk about something else."

This is most apparent with DeepSeek. If you use their web chat with V3 and then jailbreak it, you'll get uncensored output but it is then swapped with "Let's talk about something else" halfway through the output. And if you ask the model, it has no idea its previous output got swapped and you can even ask it build on its previous answer. But if you use the API, you can push it pretty far with a simple jailbreak.

These classifiers are virtually always ran on a separate track, meaning you cannot jailbreak them.

If you use an API, you only have to deal with the inherent training data bias, neutering by tuning and neutering by pre-prompt. The last two are, depending on the model, fairly trivial to overcome.

I still think the first big AI company that has the guts to say "our LLM is like a pen and brush, what you write or draw with it is on you" and publishes a completely unneutered model will be the one to take a huge slice of marketshare. If I had to bet on anyone doing that, it would be xAI with Grok. And by not neutering it, the model will perform better in SFW tasks too.

> and the earlier Geminis had more refusals.

You can turn off those, Google lets you decide how much it censors you can completely turn it off.

It has separate sliders for sexually explicit, hate, dangerous and harassment. It is by far the best at this, since sometimes you want those refusals/filters.

Have you tried the Gemini Live audio-to-audio in the free Gemini iOS app? I find it feels far more natural than ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode.

What do you mean miss? You don’t have the budget to keep something you truly miss for $20? What am in missing here / I don’t mean to criticize I am just curious is all. I would reword but I have to go

What is true audio-to-audio in this case?

They used to be, but not anymore, not since Gemini Pro 2.5. Their "deep research" offering is the best available on the market right now, IMO - better than both ChatGPT and Claude.