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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if Google is having the worst marketing fumble or the most genius marketing one. Their "flash" models are very comparable to other companies' "pro" or "flagship" models. It seems to be a quite counterintuitive naming convention as it undersells the models.

Unless they have an even more powerful Gemini Pro in the oven...?

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the 3.5 pro pretrain was a complete disaster, they shelved it and are now working on gemini 4.

3.0 flash -> 3.8 flash is all post training which is pretty impressive.

Do labs come back from disasters like GDM’s 3.5 pretrain? I am thinking of Meta’s Llama 4. Meta is just now starting to be taken seriously again but they are definitely not at the frontier. And when I say “come back” I mean have an Opus 4.5 moment, which was really mind blowing for me at the time. Fable was a similar leap, just not as big.

OpenAI had such a disaster themselves before, GPT-4, so they replaced it with 4o.

gpt4.5 was also one such disaster for them iirc

Unless the company is going under, why not? Let's say Google releases Gemini Pro 4 tomorrow, and it's better than Fable and Sol; lots of people would switch over to it.

AI models are almost completely interchangeable, so the best/cheapest/fastest whatever will always have a market.

I agree we’d switch to it. I guess what I’m doubting is if a company can recover from that sort of stumble in the first place. And they might not want to either. They might think there’s more value somewhere else besides trying to get back to the absolute performance and capability frontier. Smaller models targeted to specific domains that large models would be too inefficient at no matter how large they get or how clever you are at distillation, for example.

Not sure if you'll see this comment since it's been a week, but how did you find this out? Is 3.5 Pro officially cancelled internally? Are they only working on 4 Pro now?

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if it's about keeping the federal government out of their business after seeing what happened to Sol & Mythos.

My assumption is that they're cooking an ultra humongous Gemini 4 Pro release. They certainly have the cash and the compute for it, and it's so obviously the thing to do from a strategic perspective.

Well if that's the case, it's been in the oven for quite a while now.

not saying they do have a beefier pro, but even if they did, isn't the delta between flash vs pro models reduced quite a bit? (e.g glm 5.3 flash vs 5.3, v4 flash vs v4 pro, sonnet 5 vs opus 5)?

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