My qualitative take to support this is that Gemini seems to have the strongest spatial reasoning that translates nicely into CAD and engineering domain challenges. Less clear, but I also suspect a better world understanding of materials and their interactions in an intuitive way. I have this sense that Claude can tell me everything there is to know about how to spec a gasket, but it’s like Gemini actually knows what a gasket feels like and can intuit what it’s going to do.

My partner runs an internal computational mechanics benchmark that hasn’t tracked progress with model advancements (flat/no progress since early 2026) until suddenly saturating from argon and carbon. My take is that it’s due to spatial reasoning (most of the challenges are programming that require a lot of shape rotation type thinking), but we don’t know just yet why Gemini is doing so much better.

Any sources to back this up?

Carbon is the first "better than meh" model form Google in more than half a year. It's been out for less than a week. How can you consider it "steady"? Their subscription and even the API has been terribly unstable throughout the past few days, so I'm having really trouble believing any of this.