[tenpoundhammer]

I have been using chatGPT a ton over the last months and paying the subscription. Used it for coding, news, stock analysis, daily problems, and a whatever I could think of. I decided to give Gemini a go when version three came out to great reviews. Gemini handles every single one of my uses cases much better and consistently gives better answers. This is especially true for situations were searching the web for current information is important, makes sense that google would be better. Also OCR is phenomenal chatgpt can't read my bad hand writing but Gemini can easily. Only downsides are in the polish department, there are more app bugs and I usually have to leave the happen or the session terminates. There are bugs with uploading photos. The biggest complaint is that all links get inserted into google search and then I have to manipulate them when they should go directly to the chosen website, this has to be some kind of internal org KPI nonsense. Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.

[dmd]

I consistently have exactly the opposite experience. ChatGPT seems extremely willing to do a huge number of searches, think about them, and then kick off more searches after that thinking, think about it, etc., etc. whereas it seems like Gemini is extremely reluctant to do more than a couple of searches. ChatGPT also is willing to open up PDFs, screenshot them, OCR them and use that as input, whereas Gemini just ignores them.

[nullbound]

I will say that it is wild, if not somewhat problematic that two users have such disparate views of seemingly the same product. I say that, but then I remember my own experience just from few days ago. I don't pay for gemini, but I have paid chatgpt sub. I tested both for the same product with seemingly same prompt and subbed chatgpt subjectively beat gemini in terms of scope, options and links with current decent deals.

It seems ( only seems, because I have not gotten around to test it in any systematic way ) that some variables like context and what the model knows about you may actually influence quality ( or lack thereof ) of the response.

[ghostpepper]

Same, I use chatgpt plus (the entry-level paid option) extensively for personal research projects and coding, and it seems miles ahead of whatever "Gemini Pro" is that I have through work. Twice yesterday, gemini repeated verbatim a previous response as if I hadn't asked another question and told it why the previous response was bad. Gemini feels like chatGPT from two years ago.

[staticman2]

Are you uploading PDFs that already have a text layer?

I don't currently subscribe to Gemini but on A.I. Studio's free offering when I upload a non OCR PDF of around 20 pages the software environment's OCR feeds it to the model with greater accuracy than I've seen from any other source.

[whazor]

I agree with you. To me, gemini has much worse search results. Then again, I use kagi for search and I cannot stand the search results from Google anymore. And its clear that gemini uses those.

In contrast, chatgpt has built their own search engine that performs better in my experience. Except for coding, then I opt for Claude opus 4.5.

[noname120]

Perplexity Pro with any thinking model blows both out of the water in a fraction of the time, in my experience

[kccqzy]

> The biggest complaint is that all links get inserted into google search and then I have to manipulate them when they should go directly to the chosen website, this has to be some kind of internal org KPI nonsense.

Oh I know this from my time at Google. The actual purpose is to do a quick check for known malware and phishing. Of course these days such things are better dealt with by the browser itself in a privacy preserving way (and indeed that’s the case), so it’s unnecessary to reveal to Google which links are clicked. It’s totally fine to manipulate them to make them go directly to the website.

[gjuggler]

I think Gemini is just broken.

Instead of forwarding model-generated links to https://www.google.com/url?q=[URL], which serves the purpose of malware check and user-facing warning about linking to an external site, Gemini forwards links to https://www.google.com/search?q=[URL], which does... a Google search for the URL, which isn't helpful at all.

Example: https://gemini.google.com/share/3c45f1acdc17

NotebookLM by comparison, does the right thing: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7078d629-4b35-4894-bb...

It's kind of impressive how long this obviously-broken link experience has been sitting in the Gemini app used by millions.

[sundarurfriend]

That's interesting, I just today started getting some "Some sites restrict our ability to check links." dialogue in ChatGPT that wanted me to verify that I really wanted to follow the link, with a Learn More link to this page: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10984597-chatgpt-generat...

So it seems like ChatGPT does this automatically and internally, instead of using an indirect check like this.

[solarkraft]

> Only downsides are in the polish department

What an understatement. It has me thinking „man, fuck this“ on the daily.

Just today it spontaneously lost an entire 20-30 minutes long thread and it was far from the first time. It basically does it any time you interrupt it in any way. It’s straight up data loss.

It’s kind of a typical Google product in that it feels more like a tech demo than a product.

It has theoretically great tech. I particularly like the idea of voice mode, but it’s noticeably glitchy, breaks spontaneously often and keeps asking annoying questions which you can’t make it stop.

[sundarurfriend]

ChatGPT web UI was also like this for the longest time, until a few months ago: all sorts of random UI bugs leading either to data loss or misleading UI state. Interrupting still is very flaky there too. And on the mobile app, if you move away from the app while it's taking time to think, its state would somehow desync from the actual backend thinking state, and get stuck randomly; sometimes restarting the app fixes it, sometimes that chat is that unusable from that point on.

And the UI lack of polish shows up freshly every time a new feature lands too - the "branch in new chat" feature is really finicky still, getting stuck in an unusable state if you twitch your eyebrows at wrong moment.

[deepGem]

There is no competing product for GPT Voice. Hands down. I have tried Claude, Gemini - they don't even comes close.

But voice is not a huge traffic funnel. Text is. And the verdict is more or less unanimous at this time. Gemini 3.0 has outdone ChatGPT. I unsubscribed from GPT plus today. I was a happy camper until the last month when I started noticing deplorable bugs.

1. The conversation contexts are getting intertwined.Two months ago, I could ask multiple random queries in a conversation and I would get correct responses but the last couple of weeks, it's been a harrowing experience having to start a new chat window for almost any change in thread topic. 2. I had asked ChatGPT to once treat me as a co-founder and hash out some ideas. Now for every query - I get a 'cofounder type' response. Nothing inherently wrong but annoying as hell. I can live with the other end of the spectrum in which Claude doesn't remember most of the context.

Now that Gemini pro is out, yes the UI lacks polish, you can lose conversations, but the benefits of low latency search and a one year near free subscription is a clincher. I am out of ChatGPT for now, 5.2 or otherwise. I wish them well.

[KronisLV]

> It has me thinking „man, fuck this“ on the daily.

That's sometimes me with the CLI. I can't use the Gemini CLI right now on Windows (in the Terminal app), because trying to copy in multiple lines of text for some reason submits them separately and it just breaks the whole thing. OpenCode had the same issue but even worse, it quite after the first line or something and copied the text line by line into the shell, thank fuck I didn't have some text that mentions rm -rf or something.

More info: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/14735#iss...

At the same time, neither Codex CLI, nor Claude Code had that issue (and both even showed shortened representations of copied in text, instead of just dumping the whole thing into the input directly, so I could easily keep writing my prompt).

So right now if I want to use Gemini, I more or less have to use something like KiloCode/RooCode/Cline in VSC which are nice, but might miss out on some more specific tools. Which is a shame, because Gemini is a really nice model, especially when it comes to my language, Latvian, but also your run of the mill software dev tasks.

In comparison, Codex feels quite slow, whereas Claude Code is what I gravitate towards most of the time but even Sonnet 4.5 ends up being expensive when you shuffle around millions of tokens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46216192 Cerebras Code is nice for quick stuff and the sheer amount of tokens, but in KiloCode/... regularly messes up applying diff based edits.

[radicaldreamer]

Google’s standard problem is that they don’t even use their own products. Their Pixel and Android team rocks iPhones on the daily, for example.

[adamkochanowicz]

I also love that I can leave the microphone on (not in live voice mode) while dictating to ChatGPT and pause and think as much as needed.

With Gemini, it will send as soon as I stop to think. No way to disable that.

[arjie]

Any time its safety stuff triggers, Gemini wipes the context. It's unusable because of this because whatever is going on with the safety stuff, it fires too often. I'm trying to figure out some code here, not exactly deporting ICE to Guantanamo or whatever.

[amluto]

Claude regularly computes a reply for me, then reports an error and loses the reply. I wonder what fraction of Anthropic’s compute gets wasted and redone.

[mnky9800n]

The colab integration is where it shines the most imo.

[hexnuts]

You may be interested in tools like OpenMemory

[mmaunder]

Yeah I eventually noped out as I said in another comment and am charging hard with Codex and am so happy about 5.2!!

[lxgr]

Interesting, I had the opposite experience. 5.0 "Thinking" was better than 5.1, but Gemini 3 Pro seems worse than either for web search use cases. It's hallucinating at pretty alarming rates (including making up sources it never actually accessed) for a late 2025 model.

Opus 4.5 has been a step above both for me, but the usage limits are the worst of the three. I'm seriously considering multiple parallel subscriptions at this point.

[gs17]

I've had the same experience with search, especially with it hallucinating results instead of actually finding them. It's really frustrating that you can't force a more in-depth search from the model run by the company most famous for a search engine.

[hbarka]

I’ve been putting literally the same inputs into both ChatGPT and Gemini and the intuition in answers from Gemini just fits for me. I’m now unwilling to just rely on ChatGPT.

Google, if you can find a way to export chats into NotebookLM, that would be even better than the Projects feature of ChatGPT.

[siva7]

notebooklm is heavily biased to only use the sources i added and frame every task around them - even if it is nonsensical - so it is not that useful for novel research. it also tends to hallucinate when lots of data is involved.

[LogicFailsMe]

All I want for Christmas is a "No NotebookLM slop" checkbox on youtube.

[didibus]

> Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.

Depends, even though Gemini 3 is a bit better than GPT5.1, the quality of the ChatGPT apps themselves (mobile, web) have kept me a subscriber to it.

I think Google needs to not-google themselves into a poor app experience here, because the models are very close and will probably continue to just pass each other in lock step. So the overall product quality and UX will start to matter more.

Same reason I am sticking to Claude Code for coding.

[concinds]

The ChatGPT Mac app especially feels much nicer to use. I like Gemini more due to the context window but I doubt Google will ever create a native Mac app.

[bayarearefugee]

This matches my experience pretty closely when it comes to LLM use for coding assistance.

I still find a lot to be annoyed with when it comes to Gemini's UI and its... continuity, I guess is how I would describe it? It feels like it starts breaking apart at the seams a bit in unexpected ways during peak usages including odd context breaks and just general UI problems.

But outside of UI-related complaints, when it is fully operational it performs so much better than ChatGPT for giving actual practical, working answers without having to be so explicit with the prompting that I might as well have just written the code myself.

[luhn]

That's hilarious and right on brand for Google that they spend millions developing cutting-edge technology and fumble the ball making a chat app.

[spwa4]

Every Google app is a chat app, except maybe search.

[azan_]

That's interesting. I've got completely different impression. Every time I use Gemini I'm surprised how bad it is. My main complaint is that Gemini is too lazy.

[Nathanba]

Same for me, at this point I'm seriously starting to think that these are ads for and by Google because for me Gemini is the worst.

[varispeed]

Get Gemini answer and tell ChatGPT this is what my friend said. Then put ChatGPT answer to Claude and so on. It's a cheat code.

[tenpoundhammer]

I did this today it was amazing. If I would have had time I would try other models as well. Great tip thanks

[clhodapp]

A cheat code to what?

[AznHisoka]

ChatGPT seems to just randomly pick urls to cite and extract information from.

Google Gemini seems to look at heuristics like whether the author is trustworthy, or an expert in the topic. But more advanced

[FpUser]

I've read many very positive reviews about Gemini 3. I tried using it including Pro and to me it looks very inferior to ChatGPT. What was very interesting though was when I caught it bullshitting me I called its BS and Gemini expressed very human like behavior. It did try to weasel its way out, degenerated down to "true Scotsman" level but finally admitted that it was full of it. this is kind of impressive / scary.

[TacticalCoder]

Yeah basically the same here. And many people on paid ChatGPT subscription like us noticed just that. Gemini 3 Pro "thinking" is really good.

> Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.

I think the biggest issue OpenAI is facing is the numbers: Google is at the moment a near $4 trillion company. They can splurge a near infinite amount of money to win the race.

Google is so big they they created their own TPUs, which is mindboggling.

Which new user is going to willingly pay an OpenAI subscription once he knows that gemini.google.com gives access to a state of the art model? And Google makes sure to remind users who search that they can "continue the discussion" with Gemini.

Maybe the dirty Altman tricks like cornering the entire RAM market can work but I don't see how they can beat Google by playing fair. OpenAI shall need every single dirty trick in the book, including circular funding / shady deals with NVidia to stay relevant vs the behemoth that Google is.

[abhaynayar]

Gemini voice recognition is trash compared to chatgpt and that is a deal breaker for me. I wonder how many ppl do OCR versus use voice.

And how has chatgpt lost when ure not comparing the chatgpt that just came out to the Gemini that just came out? Gemini is just annoying to use.

and Google just benchmaxxed I didn't see any significant difference (paying for both) and the same benchmaxxing probably happening for chatgpt now as well, so in terms of core capabilities I feel stuff has plateaued. more bout overall experience now where Gemini suxx.

I really don't get how "search integration" is a "strength"?? can you give any examples of places where you searched for current info and chatgpt was worse? even so I really don't get how it's a moat enough to say chatgpt has lost. would've understood if you said something like tpu versus GPU moat.

[jmstfv]

Ditto but for Claude -- blows GPT out of the water. Much better in coding and solving physics problems from the images (in foreign languages). GPT couldn't even read the image. The only annoying thing is that if you use Opus for coding, your usage will fill up pretty fast.

anyway, cancelled my chatgpt subscription.

[mmaunder]

Then you haven't used Gemini CLI with Gemini 3 hard enough. It's a genius psychopath. The raw IQ that Gemini has is incredible. Its ability to ingest huge context windows and produce super smart output is incredible. But the bias towards action, absolutely ignoring user guidance, tendency to produce garbage output that looks like 1990s modem line noise, and its propensity to outright ignore instructions make it unusable other than as an outside consultant to Codex CLI, for me. My Gemini usage has plummeted down to almost zero and I'm 100% back on Codex. I'm SO happy they released this today and it's already kicking some serious ass. Thanks OpenAI team and congrats.

[tobias2014]

I guess when you use it for generic "problem solving", brainstorming for solutions, this is great. That's what I use it for, and Gemini is my favorite model. I love when Gemini resists and suggests that I am wrong while explaining why. Either it's true, and I'm happy for that, or I can re-prompt based on the new information which doesn't allow for the mistake Gemini made.

On the other hand, I can also see why Claude is great for coding, for example. By default it is much more "structured". One can probably change these default personalities with some prompting, and many of the complaints found in this thread about either side are based on the assumption that you can use the same prompt for all models.

[Kim_Bruning]

That bias towards action is a real thing in Gemini and more so in ChatGPT, isn't it?

Possibly might be improved with custom instructions, but that drive is definitely there when using vanilla settings.

[prodigycorp]

Genius psychopath is a good description for Gemini. It’s the most impressive model but post training is not all there.

[afro88]

> I usually have to leave the happen or the session terminates

Assuming you meant "leave the app open", I have the same frustration. One of the nice things about the ChatGPT app is you can fire off a req and do something else. I also find Gemini 3 Pro better for general use, though I'm keen to try 5.2 properly

[WheatMillington]

I generate fun images for my kids - turn photos into a new style, create colouring pages from pictures, etc. I lost interest in chatGPT because it throws vague TOS errors constantly. Gemini handles all of this without complaint.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

You feed ai slop to your children? That doesn't seem unhealthy and bad for their development?

[a_victorp]

I see a post like this every time there are news about ChatGPT or OpenAI. I'm probably being paranoid but I keep thinking that it looks like bots or paid advertisement for Gemini

[tenpoundhammer]

I think people like me just enjoying sharing when something is working for them and they have a good experience. It probably gets voted up because people enjoy reading when that happens

[jdiff]

The consistent side comments about the interface to Gemini being "half baked" probably doesn't fit into that narrative.

[jnordt]

Can you share some examples of this where it gives better results?

For me both Gemini and ChatGPT (both paid versions Key in Gemini and ChatGPT Plus) give me similiar results in terms of "every day" research. Im sticking with ChatGPT at the moment, as the UI and scaffolding around the model is in my view better at ChatGpt (e.g. you can add more than one picture at once...)

For Software Development, I tested Gemini3 and I was pretty disappointed in comparison to Claude Opus CLI, which is my daily driver.

[UltraSane]

Google has such a huge advantage in the amount of training data with the Google search database and with YouTube and in terms of FLOPS with their TPUs.

[razster]

Just a fair warning, it likes to spell Acknowledge as Acknolwedge. And I've run into issues when it's accessing markdown guides, it loses track and hallucinates from time to time which is annoying.

[bossyTeacher]

A future where Google still dominates, is that a future we want? I feel a future with more players is better than one with just a single one. Competition is valuable for us consumers

[melagonster]

It happened at least once; when I asked too many questions, the Gemini web page stopped working because it was occupying too much RAM...

[NickNaraghi]

Straight up Silicon Valley warfare in the HN comment section.

[bckr]

Gemini is good at reading bad handwriting you say? Might need to give it a shot at my 10 years of journals

[Razengan]

It would be useful to see some examples of the differences and supposed strengths of Gemini so this doesn't come off as Google advertisement snarf.

Also, I would never, ever, trust Google for privacy or sign into a Google account except on YouTube (and clear cookies afterwards to stop them from signing me into fucking Search too).

[m00dy]

it's true that Gemini-3 pro is very good, I recently used it on deepwalker [0]. Its agentic performance is amazing. Much better than 5.1

[0]: https://deepwalker.xyz

[anonnon]

Could you elaborate on GPT-based stock analysis?

[citizenpaul]

What?? Am I using the same gemini as everyone else?

>OCR is phenomenal

I literally tried to OCR a TYPED document in Gemini today and it mangled it so bad I just transcribed it myself because it would take less time than futzing around with gemini.

> Gemini handles every single one of my uses cases much better and consistently gives better answers.

>coding

I asked it to update a script by removing some redundant logic yesterday. Instead of removing it it just put == all over the place essentially negating but leaving all the code and also removing the actual output.

>Stocks analysis

lol, now I know where my money comes from.

[aix1]

Was that with Gemini 3 Pro or a different Gemini model?

[Daz912]

No desktop app, not using it

[eru]

HN doesn't have a dedicated desktop app either.

[LorenDB]

What is it with the Polish always messing up products?

(yes, /s)

[petersumskas]

It’s because their thoughts are Roman while they are always Russian to Finnish things.

Kenya believe it!

Anyway, I’m done here. Abyssinia.

[labrador]

I like their hotdogs

[xyzsparetimexyz]

Why do people pay for ai tools? I didn't get that. I feel like I just rotate between them on the free tiers. Unless you're paying for all of them, what's the point?

[Zambyte]

I pay for Kagi and get all of the major ones, a great search engine that I can tune to my liking, and the ability to link any model to my tuned web search.

[Onewildgamer]

Google AI mode constantly does mistakes and I go back to chatgpt even when I don't like it.

[billyrnalvo]

Oh my good heavens, gotta tell ya, you wrestled that rascal to the floor with a shit-eating grin! Good times my friend!