Comment by vessenes
19 hours ago
They actually do help - in that they give the model more computation time and also allow realtime management of the input context by the model. You can see this same behavior in the excessive comment writing some coding models engage in; Anthropic interviews said these do actually help the model.
Gemini did not one-shot these answers; it did its thinking elsewhere (probably not released by Google) and then it consolidated it down into what you see in the PDF. From the article:
> We achieved this year’s result using an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think – an enhanced reasoning mode for complex problems that incorporates some of our latest research techniques, including parallel thinking. This setup enables the model to simultaneously explore and combine multiple possible solutions before giving a final answer, rather than pursuing a single, linear chain of thought.
I don't see any parallel thinking, e.g., so that was probably elided in the final results.
Yes, because these are the answers it gave, not the thinking.