I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.
Astra wins handily on every other benchmark, too. Research, science, 3D, visual, Humanity's Last Exam, etc.
However, if I want it to DO something then Gemini is in absolute last place. I don't trust it for anything more than renaming files that I don't care about very much or extracting data (though it's too expensive for data extraction at scale).
It’s for this exact kind of scenario where a random question pops in to my head.
Plus, it’s the most grounded by real live data of all the chatbots.
Silicon Valley people are majorly sleeping on Google Search AI Mode.
People use text with LLMs but it's great to have a high fidelity "analyze this image"
I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.
Maybe everybody is wrong about how valuable these companies will be, but atm it looks very dumb to not be competitive in coding.
Occam's Razor is overwhelmingly that they just don't have the organisational capability to capture this market. If they did then they absolutely would have.
Google has essentially give up the race for the frontier. The gap is widening very fast. Their strategy appears to be to focus on niche areas like voice, small models for on-device (see their deal with Apple), and specialised models for tasks like search, which are very inference efficient.
Google in a sense won (me over) like that. I also expected them to brute force their way into everything and dominate. This is how it played out though. Image generation is great as well, but ChatGPT one is more lenient on copyright and nannying - for example when my kid asks me to "take a photo of him and Sonic". Gemini cops out either because of the kid or Sonic, disappointing us both, but ChatGPT can be.. persuaded.
Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.
Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do.
Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow.
Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there).
I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you.
Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.
Bragging rights to say they have a SOTA model. I guess that was more like Google of 10 years ago with moonshot projects. Nowadays, yeah, perhaps if it's not helping sell ads, it doesn't make sense.
It would be utter stupidity if they keep competing with hyper agile frontier labs. They sensibly moving to big infra provider and that's good niche.
> .. perhaps if it's not helping sell ads,
Perhaps cloud business is also a thing which is making big revenue
At worst Google just need to keep the lights on until the frontier labs file for bankruptcy under the weight of that >$1tn debt they've built up paying for FAANG's data centers. Then Google walks away from all of this with the the best remaining models, best R&D lab, and several hundred billion dollars in infrastructure on their balance sheet.
Catch is, even Googlers internally do not have access to top-tier models. (or did not until recently, when apparently Claude was made accessible to the SWEs internally).
Funny enough, after trying it, I went back to G3.8
these are essentially monthly releases, the dated releases that Deepseek and Qwen do make more sense
As opposed to what, them not having it and burning money that isn't their instead like openai and anthropic? At least Google is feeding itself instead of having to create a bubble to stay alive
Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries.
Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan.
No, Google is not broke.
Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai
If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.