Google Pays Samsung 'Enormous Sums' for Gemini AI App Installs (msn.com) 27
Google pays Samsung an "enormous sum of money" every month to preinstall Google generative AI app, Gemini, on its phones and devices, according to court testimony, even though the company's practice of paying for installations has twice been found to violate the law. From a report: The company began paying Samsung for Gemini in January, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Google's vice president of platforms and device partnerships, who testified Monday in Washington federal court as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case. The contract, set to run at least two years, provides fixed monthly payments for each device that preinstalls Gemini and pays Samsung a percentage of the revenue Google earns from advertisements within the app, Fitzgerald told Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the case.
I disabled Gemini (Score:3, Insightful)
It's annoying that I disabled Gemini but still see buttons and prompts for it. I also changed my default assistant but still get the Google one popping up with certain shortcuts, even though it should be bringing up the dummy app I chose.
What a pain in the ass.
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Gemini is the cockroach of apps. Incredibly difficult to get rid of and nobody actually wants it.
Reminds me the old days when you'd install a random program on Windows and it would try to install a browser toolbar for you. Nobody wanted these things, but dozens of major companies were convinced they had to have it to hold onto the market. A market of basically zero customers that would pay for a toolbar that shows you ads and sniff your search history.
Fast forward 20 years and nobody has learned a thing. Bi
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I find the summary that shows up in search engines to be quite useless if the text is AI generated. Like when you ask it some random bizarre question. As it offers no citations or references in order to confirm the correctness of the result. ... I could have just clicked on the link or gone straight to a dictionary if that's all I r
For the summary that is just a synopsis of a dictionary or wikipedia entry with a link to that entry is somewhat useful (Google, DuckDuckGo, and others all do this), but you know
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I'd like a personal AI agent that actually works. Problem is, they don't actually work, and are probably 100 years from being useful, as far as I am concerned.
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AI agents work perfectly for their intended purpose, to collect user information and guide them to sites for further engagement and purchases.
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Yeah. That's not something I have any use for.
If it can't anticipate my needs and have what i want delivered to me without any involvement on my part, it's useless, as far as I am concerned.
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Some AI vendor will make a product that extracts your personal data while offering you some incidentally useful feature, and that will make it the killer AI app. The vast majority of people online will end up using it. And then enshitification will rub that useful feature out of existence.
The problem I have with the current paradigm is that stuff can be useful for a millisecond, generally to capture a user base, sometimes by accident. And once greed sets in, the owners of the tech realize that the end user
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First world problems are a real bitch, eh?
Do they pay, or pay? (Score:1)
Paying someone to pre-install your (cr)app on their devices is pretty standard practice. Without it, TVs and even phones would cost a good chunk of change more than they do today.
Paying Samsung to put an AI tool on their phones presumably commands a premium because Samsung have their own AI (albeit, probably the shittest of all AIs, given Samsung wrote it) - putting a competing one on would naturally demand greater fees.
Paying Samsung to put a tool on their phones at the expense of someone else's competing
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Most people just go with the default apps that come on their phone for most things (no, I don't have statistics, but Gemini itself says "A large majority of smartphone users, about 95%, tend to stick with the default apps and settings on their phones" FWIW). My parents haven't installed a single app on their phones that I didn't install for them. So Gemini could be an absolute genius app, and most people would
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Paying someone to pre-install your (cr)app on their devices is pretty standard practice. Without it, TVs and even phones would cost a good chunk of change more than they do today.
Paying Samsung to put an AI tool on their phones presumably commands a premium because Samsung have their own AI (albeit, probably the shittest of all AIs, given Samsung wrote it) - putting a competing one on would naturally demand greater fees.
Paying Samsung to put a tool on their phones at the expense of someone else's competing tool, that's not okay.
So in summary... I'm not sure there's anything wrong here, other than if google need to pay so much to get it on there, maybe it's not actually very good?
Nothing wrong here? Didn't even bother to read the first sentence of the summary?
Google pays Samsung an "enormous sum of money" every month to preinstall Google generative AI app, Gemini, on its phones and devices, according to court testimony, even though the company's practice of paying for installations has twice been found to violate the law.
"violate the law" seems pretty clear-cut. If it's twice been found to violate the law, and they're still doing it? That's textbook "wrong." I know we're in an era where our government seems hell-bent on doing away with law, but legality still counts in the corporate world, despite the inconvenience of it.
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Does this still apply if Samsung is based outside the US? I don't live in the US and bought a new Samsung phone a few days ago (the old phone no longer gets Android updates and Samsung have about the longest software support), it has Gemini. Why should that worry the courts in the US?
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Does this still apply if Samsung is based outside the US? I don't live in the US and bought a new Samsung phone a few days ago (the old phone no longer gets Android updates and Samsung have about the longest software support), it has Gemini. Why should that worry the courts in the US?
That's a fair question, and one I can't directly answer. I can only address the direct flaunting of US law within the US. Outside the US? Up to your government and courts.
I suppose that's anti-American of me.
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It does if they want to sell their phones in the US market.
Doesn't matter where they're based. If you want to do business in a particular country, you follow their rules.
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"violate the law" seems pretty clear-cut. If it's twice been found to violate the law, and they're still doing it?
It is very mis-leading for the article to make such a claim without providing a citation to the cases where the judge found that doing exactly this is illegal. Just because some other type of paid-bundling is illegal, it does not necessarily mean that this is illegal.
Without citation, it is just a journalistic interpretation. Worth less than what you pay for it.
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Think about the kinds of stuff people feed into GAN tools, now imagine how
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Yes, clearly Google think it's worth it to them to pay to get Gemini pre-installed. The commercial value is immaterial though - it's only illegal if it's designed to squeeze other players out of the market. If the deal Google have struck has clauses that prevent other AI players from doing the same thing, then it's likely illegal, otherwise it may be perfectly legal.
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And it only takes a couple of clicks... (Score:2)
Rules without enforcement and penalties (Score:2)
Aren't really rules at all
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Imagine what that would do to the advertising industry.
Probably influence future elections even more.
This is bad (Score:2)
If Gemini is what powers the AI overview in Google Search, they're basically paying to distribute misinformation.
Most of the time I read it, after clicking the links it gives for references, I find out it's made a plausible response to my query from unrelated sources, making statements that sound correct, but are wrong.
It's curious (Score:2)
It's curious how these "AI" features, which are supposedly incredibly desirable and powerful tools for consumers, have to be forced onto them with huge payments to middlemen and distributors. It's almost as if no one would install them if they had the choice to do it themselves.