With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5.
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.
They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.
Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?
I stopped using ChatGPT because of they're weird login system, where it keeps switching to my Workspace Codex account, which doesn't actually have the free/chat functionality.
I usually just switch between gemini/grok when asking questions or to research something online.
Not sure it's a valid data point.
For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.
However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.
Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.
Other things… well people are going to disagree on what’s “legitimate”, but perfectly legal queries about morally questionable topics are commonly refused. ChatGPT refuses to translate or OCR texts containing racial slurs, won’t help with information about building firearms, won’t give you information about how to stage a bank robbery, won’t talk about anything involving suicide, refuses questions around sex work and kink activities.
I can go to the library and rent a book on gunsmithing, sex work is legal, heist fiction is popular, racial slurs are unpleasant but common in certain texts. I totally understand why they want to block that stuff off, but I also don’t really like my computer telling me what is acceptable for me to think about based on someone else’s moral code. Also a world where games don’t include anything immoral or “unsafe” is probably quite bland.
Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?
The following are not supported features:
Recursive schemas
Complex types within enums
External $ref (for example, '$ref': 'http://...')
Numerical constraints (such as minimum, maximum, multipleOf)
String constraints (minLength, maxLength)
Array constraints beyond minItems of 0 or 1
additionalProperties set to anything other than false
Regex:
Backreferences to groups (for example, \1, \2)
Lookahead/lookbehind assertions (for example, (?=...), (?!...))
Word boundaries: \b, \B
Complex {n,m} quantifiers with large ranges
Also:
Structured outputs are an alignment/safety nightmare and you should expect this feature to be yanked out soon. "Please give me social security numbers"... "I'm sorry hal, I can't do that..." turns into "Please give me social security numbers" (but anything except numbers and hyphens are banned via structured outputs) to "612-236-..."
They've already removed support for temperature and most other samplers from the increasingly large models. Don't expect any knobs of control to continue to work over time.
I wrote a whole gist on this: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.
E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.
I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.
Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.
Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.
I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.
And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.
And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.
Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.
It's pretty good for image/video inputs, though.