mchusma

I was more skeptical of openrouter a year ago. Not hard to implement multiple models, but after getting burned multiple times (eg Google in particular) I see openrouter as serving a few key functions: (1) aggregating demand across neoclouds for performance etc (2) providing a great developer experience (3) easily switching models and normalizing the idiosyncratic nature of each. There are so many (good) model providers today this is more compelling now with 10+ solid model companies than a year ago when I thought it might be just 3.

So I have shifted load away from calling some models to openrouter.

I really think ebikes, and things like this, would have a much better reputation if they really only supported up to maybe 10 km/h or 6 mph. This is a normalish running/jogging pace. Basically, they helped up hills and when tired but were not "motorcycles-lite". At least around us, in an area with lots of kids, people want to have them but there are so many injuries and problems that sentiment is generally very negative. And I think all you need to "make biking easy" is low speed assist. You don't need support up to 20 mph for that.

I also had low energy but that was really mostly when I was losing weight, which made sense. As I slowed weight loss and reduced dose, energy improved.

Maybe? But GLM just put itself on the pareto today again, so its up to 10. The theory was that there would be recursive self improvement in models, leading to a 1 or a handful of entities running away from the rest. But basically the opposite happened? Different teams, different hardware stacks. What do we make of this? (1) There must not really be any deep secrets/moats right now? (2) improving models is not something you can throw only intelligence at now?

This is a solid release (at the intro pricing, the other pricing is dumb). I do think its a missed opportunity to really blow things out of the water and have this be another 1/2 off, but clearly they don't have the inference efficiency for it. Speed is good, the knowledge in google's models is solid for those usecases, price is reasonable (after 3.5/3.6 major missteps).

The intelligence index vs cost pareto frontier is crazy now, its basically a flat line with 9 people all at or right at the edge of the frontier along various parts of the graphs. Insanely competitive right now.

I think in this case its a sign they are subsidizing usage, so it means that the only people left using it in Jan 2027 will be some enterprisy or orphaned workflows which should pay up or migrate off.

Nice to see SpaceX on the model frontier! They have been chasing it for a while.

Many good comments here. It’s somewhat common for me to voice record say a blog post of product updates, more like a ramble. Then have Claude clean it up. Then argue back and forth about certain things until it’s good, then make a final pass sometimes to change a few key words. This is incredibly different than pure ai text. Presumably it will show as ai generated here, even though I would argue it is not really. So I can’t use Claude for this usecase anymore.

I think the solution is assume everything is ai generated unless told otherwise and rely on authorship/brand as a sign of quality.

Cool! I wish there was a way to print boards for hobby purposes. What is the lowest price you would work with? Ballpark

I genuinely think this is a good idea if implemented well and there is a human backup. I’ve had 911 not answer before. I’ve called for things that I wasn’t 100% sure are valid.

As long as implemented well.

Yes, that is the really compelling thing here IMO. Its a viable deepseek competitor for many people, and I missed that on the first pass.

This is a nice release and a solid improvement over Spark 1.1. It compares favorably with Grok 4.5. Not SOTA, but solid releases. I think they need to really get this more competitive with Deepseek V4 Flash / Luna pricing to move the needle.

I thought it was a typo, or strange url at first.

Curious why you support unions in general? It’s kind of like saying “I support governments” or “I support companies”.

If Luna hadn't price dropped yesterday it would have been a real blowout.

Yes part of the legal defense used to good effect is that they are copying one for one (not really making a copy but rather converting it). I agree with many in this thread that copyright reform is the best solution here. Shorter copyrights. Lose copyright if you stop using it (printing it), more clear digitization and preservation guidelines.

Gemini 3.1 pro is really good for knowledge tasks. Google has done well there. And image analysis with Gemini flash 3.6 is solid. It’s just anything coding or agentic they fall short.

There is a expiring soon 50% boost to your usage limits, so I think its 2.7x not 4x what you are seeing right now. I think, but its convoluted :)

Nothing is free. We want both low cost and high quality healthcare.

This means we need to have ways in incentivize innovation (AI diagnostics, robotic procedures, drug discovery, deeper R&D).

Free Markets (with government controls against monopoly) are generally better than governments at delivering cost and quality improvements, but healthcare in most countries is somewhere between “100% not a market” and “70% not a market” (the US). In many cases, governments also actively create and enforce monopolies (eg AMA or local hospitals in the US).

There are a million other things but part of what is required for markets to work is skin in the game, which the UK, Canada, and the US all do bad jobs of in their own ways.

Some say medicine has no elasticity. I don’t think that is true for 90% of spend (for gunshot wounds, maybe, but most spending is on chronic diseases where multiple providers and approaches are available and people could price shop).

I would like to see more countries experiment with more free market healthcare. It’s remarkably effective for many pieces of healthcare.

My 2 cents, all these high level videos kind of suck, even the professional ones, when they don’t show the product. Even videos I produce for this purpose! I don’t think this is that bad. I’ve seen worse.

Incredible. This is definitely the launch of the day. Just crushing Google's releases.

The pricing here is incredible. This is the first US release that's competitive with DeepSeek V4 Flash. Very excited about this.

Wow, Laguna S 2.1 (released today) just destroys Flash-Lite underly and completely. What a weak and embarrasing release from Google.

Maybe, but they said they have “started” the Gemini 4 pretrain. So not having done any significant pretrain in a year or so seems odd to me.

3.6 Flash would be a great model at 3.0 flash pricing. At this pricing, its thoroughly trounced by about 10 models on cost/performance including Grok 4.5. 3.5 Flash-ite would be a great model at 2.5 flash-lite pricing, as is, its trounced by many models including Deepseek v4 Flash.

As is, they are thoroughly outclassed for most usecases. I will say the one area where i do see Gemini punching above its weight class is in tasks that are effectively "Google this for me" / knowledge stuff. So it does have a role, and I do use it. So while I think Google is still in a strong position overall, they are really stuck as a tier 2 AI player right now with text models. They are tier 1 in bio, images, and video.

The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing.

But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation).

Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.

I am generally for a light government touch, but I think excessive light and sound are forms of pollution and should be generally regulated in a not-overly burdensome way (give people fix it tickets etc). Policing excessive light, and excessive blue light, would be pretty trivial. And I think cameras that automatically ticket loud vehicles would be amazing.

I counted the other day and there were at least 12 different providers with "better than Opus 4.5 performance" on Artificial Analysis, Opus 4.5 being Anthropic's December release that many say kicked off the latest acceleration. Which is totally insane competition, particularly given how low switching costs. I personally think that Opus 4.5 level performance is sufficient for most apps and usecases, as they get deployed.

I’m not categorically against bans of this kind but I’m pretty sure everyone knows these are fake. I am worried about freedom of speech slippery slope issues, and also San Francisco (a relatively small eccentric city) trying to dictate US policy.

I actually think a reasonable strategy of Google is to focus on biotech, where the demand for compute is infinite, and focus on cost effective solutions with really good search for other verticals (eg legal, accounting, etc), and offer loss leaders in coding to undercut Anthropic/openai, with “cheap just behind the frontier” models.

They are not really doing this, but it makes sense to me.

This paints everyone as right or left, which I don’t find accurate or helpful. I think other labels even if they meant the same category, to be more helpful.