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Comment by summerlight | Hacker News Reader

I had access to this over few weeks, and in my impression this was the first Gemini model that I can offload complex tasks that I don't want to do myself because I have to do lots of domain specific researches, which is irrelevant to my daily works. Not 100% reliable, but its outcome is usually better than mine and the cost to verify the outcome is significantly cheaper than doing the task by myself.

The performance ceiling from the pre-training seems fairly high and they demonstrated impressive post-training improvements from Flash 3.6 -> Flash 3.8. If they can reproduce that in this model then this can be a good model for the next year. But the question is whether they can keep this up over coming years; they missed one pretraining cycle due to internal misallocation and it costed them several months of frontier competitions, and I still don't know if they addressed this structural problem.

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Can it surpass (or at least maintain) 3.1 Pro when it comes to chatting?

I've been using GPT since its 3.5 release, but starting from 5, its output always contains some meaningless nonsense or provides answers that are difficult to read just to avoid hallucinations. I find Gemini to be excellent for chatting. For example, when I'm pondering a mathematical theorem, it could provides answers that inspire me, even guiding me to think about the next question.

For me, this is the only reason to maintain multiple AI subscriptions. Gemini is irreplaceable in the realm of answering questions or chatting for learning purposes; I can leave the rest to GPT.

The model (at least on the settings I used) was not for interactive chatting. It was for longer running tasks.

Edit: my view is probably tainted by the fact that I only used it at work for work with Antigravity CLI

You use 3.1 Pro?

I should try it, I guess - I always default to Flash 3.8.

Yes. Even though 3.8 Flash outperforms 3.1 Pro in benchmarks, in my use cases, 3.8 Flash is completely inferior to 3.1 Pro.

Specifically, 3.8 Flash suffers from far more hallucinations than 3.1 Pro and frequently ignores the context between consecutive messages. These two issues are fatal to the chat experience.

Because of this experience, I believe that benchmarks are quite limited to evaluate a model's real-world performance, and most current benchmarks focus on coding performance rather than chatting. At the moment, I have almost no reason to use 3.8 Flash.

I tried 3.1 Pro over the weekend and you're right, it's great for chat. Easily my favorite. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. I'll definitely try it. I've noticed the trouble you mention, and used 3.8 Flash in spite of it, because I like the model, but it's bit me more than once.

Also, 3.8 Flash for coding... I've done several experiments with the same prompt and same codebase against other models, and it's never turned out well for Flash against GPT Sol or Astra. No reason to use it for coding, either, except for quick scripts and prototypes, where it's nice because it's so fast.

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