Yep, at this point I'd rather they hold their announcements until everybody can access it, not just the beautiful people. I'm excited and want to try it right now, and would actually use it for a PoC I have in mind, but in a few months the excitement will be gone.
It's to their detriment, also. Being told Gemini beats GPT-4 while withholding that what I'm trying out is not the model they're talking about would have me think they're full of crap. They'd be better off making it clear that this is not the one that surpasses GPT-4.
It really is. OpenAI has the Apple model of release - when it's announced the laptop is in you freaking hands 3 days later.
Google announces vaporware that's never going to come out, or something that will be out in 5 months. It's frustrating and very bad for their image in the LLM space.
This might be the best they can do to maintain any hope among nervous investors. That this may actually be the most rational play available to them would be incredibly sad.
I wonder if the "release" was done in spite of dev knowledge that it isn't really ready. Like "screw it, we want to attract eyeballs even though we know it's premature"
