Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
Most of the time I don't need what the bench tests and I'm not really giving them completely ambiguous tasks without any refinement.
I only find marginal differences between models at this point and it almost feels like personality quirks in each model than anything.
alias agy="agy --dangerously-skip-permissions"I doubt they even intended it to be, but it seems like I kept going from resorting to 3.5-3.8 (over time) to realizing that Claude and GPT, while great at Python, will make rudimentary mistakes with R; even when they compose giant complicated R code.
Anecdotally I'd rate Gemini behind Claude and OpenAI models at fiction and I can't find any benchmarks showing Gemini is the clear winner at this task.
I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.
Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident.
Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writing shorter replies on Reddit is rewarded. Nobody reads the articles, let alone a paragraph-long reply.
That all being said though, there are limits. Sometimes LLMs on high-thinking go off on full tangents based on little, and don't have the self-awareness to bring it back.
To an expert communicating with a layperson is a form of compression. You must turn some very complex idea into one that you suppose the other person can grasp given their limited frame of reference. It's always lossy, and you have to guess how much you can remove without sounding patronizing or being inaccurate. It's tough, and the more you know the tougher it gets.
Ever done that "explain what happens when I visit Google in my web browser" interview question?
A sales guy will answer in a sentence. An engineer might be able to talk about it for several days and still not be sure they didn't miss anything important. That much knowledge can actually be detrimental to communication.
So I won't be addressing this, for those reasons and others.
When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.
Their AI leadership team has taken some hits recently too, in the form of departures. I believe when they get their bearings they will be competitive again. 3.8 Flash has been a great model for me.
My ChatGPT env only says "low", "medium", "high".
Is this a "pro" thing? I have totally no idea what I'm talking to, so actually I'm thinking of stopping my plan. Gemini and Claude are much more clear about it.
Anyway, I like the speed at which Gemini responds so indeed for simple things it is preferable.
I’ve been using Work for all my queries, since it seems to just be the same interface as Chat but with more features. I don’t understand why they’re two separate things.
> This mirrors how Apple has always segmented Pro vs. non-Pro iPhones: base models got LTPS panels while Pro models got LTPO, and only with the mainline iPhone 17/17 Plus did that gap close the standard versions previously lacked the smoother 120Hz ProMotion technology and the always-on display feature, unlike the Pro models — the 17e is the one model line still using the older, cheaper panel.
(emphasis mine)
I mean, I can guess what it is trying to say, but who RL'd this nonsense?
Only worked in a 1:1 in a quiet place. Still, can't complain for free.
well then its not model problem
Tell Gemini Live which speaker you want to engage with, and it is relatively intelligent about it.
It reminds me of a pedantic grad student.
On my TODO is try and run all of the analysis pipeline in dense "machine speak" to save on tokens and just let Gemini sort it out at the end.
And like, it does this despite it speaking in extremely dense math, which both makes it sound correct and requires a lot more effort to prove when it is wrong... yet, it isn't actually correct more often, and so that time sink just isn't worth the benefit. I then think many people--including people who can speak math (as can I)--just stop bothering to check everything, as if you come across a human who speaks like this it probably does correlate with slow and careful thought that helps prevent errors.
Instead, Claude has the mistake rate of a somewhat accelerated beginner impossibly combined with the language of an expert professor; and we as humans just aren't good at that combination: it becomes very dangerous and makes it take longer to spot its egregious mistakes and trained-in biases. If you have to use Claude, I thereby claim you really need to have a team of not-Claudes to help insulate you from this, and Gemini (while being a bit senile) is a lot more collaborative and approaches problems in ways that makes it harder to get tricked.
(To translate this into more of an engineering analogy: Claude always feels to me like the engineer who put more effort into learning how to program in functional languages than into how to actually develop working code, and then confidently presents you answers in Haskell or Lisp that never quite work. To find their errors is then very costly. In contrast, Gemini feels more like a Java or Go developer who knows they are a cog... that's helpful! <- Which maybe just goes to show that AI has finally turned me into a manager, omg.)
Lately it became load-bearingly-reality-difficult to not only read, but to comprehend the Claude output
I've set my documentation sub agent to Gemini and my code agent to Luna