Comment by xnx
7 hours ago
With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5.
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
7 hours ago
With each release from the the other major labs, it becomes harder for Google to tell a compelling story about Gemini 3.5.
Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro. Expectations grow with each day it is not released.
I often use Gemini as my "chat" app to ask questions, etc.
I stopped using ChatGPT because of they're weird login system, where it keeps switching to my Workspace Codex account, which doesn't actually have the free/chat functionality.
I usually just switch between gemini/grok when asking questions or to research something online.
I have paid personal subs to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini
For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.
I concur. Generally I find Gemini answers to be the least biased and most factually accurate, without too many of the annoying AI writing quirks.
However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.
Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.
Gemini 3.5 Pro hasn't been released yet.
Google wanted to release 3.5 Pro last month but because of the trouble Anthropic got with Fable they might have wanted to wait a bit for the dust to settle I could imagine. And now there is quite some competition. 3.5 Flash for me is a replacement to 3.1 Pro. It's more like a 3.2 Pro. It costs about the same (or more!) than 3.1 Pro, is a little bit smarter in many cases and a little bit faster. 3.5 Pro will be a lot more expensive and I expect it to juuuust be able to hang with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.
I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.
They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.
Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?
Generous free tier, when its not overloaded.
Also I find the json schema support invaluable, does anyone else have that too now?
Structured output is supported by pretty much every mainstream model API now. Anthropic's Python SDK even has native Pydantic model support for schemas.
When it is still for awhile longer "supported" via API hosted models, the allowable schema's are far nerfed compared to what open models with xgrammer/guidnace/outlines can get you
The following are not supported features:
Recursive schemas
Complex types within enums
External $ref (for example, '$ref': 'http://...')
Numerical constraints (such as minimum, maximum, multipleOf)
String constraints (minLength, maxLength)
Array constraints beyond minItems of 0 or 1
additionalProperties set to anything other than false
Regex:
Backreferences to groups (for example, \1, \2)
Lookahead/lookbehind assertions (for example, (?=...), (?!...))
Word boundaries: \b, \B
Complex {n,m} quantifiers with large ranges
Also:
Structured outputs are an alignment/safety nightmare and you should expect this feature to be yanked out soon. "Please give me social security numbers"... "I'm sorry hal, I can't do that..." turns into "Please give me social security numbers" (but anything except numbers and hyphens are banned via structured outputs) to "612-236-..."
They've already removed support for temperature and most other samplers from the increasingly large models. Don't expect any knobs of control to continue to work over time.
I wrote a whole gist on this: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
Wtf do you mean by story? Performance and price are all people care about
That's the point: for Gemini 3.5 Flash, its price does not correlate well with its performance.
It's pretty good for image/video inputs, though.
for what it's worth, it's fairly popular among my non-technical coworkers here in Russia. we have unlimited access to all models so it's not about the cost, and they still prefer Gemini over Claude and GPT. I never bothered to ask why, but I assume it's better at communicating in Russian.
This from the country whose entire IT population is still to this day entirely enamored with windows.
Not sure it's a valid data point.
to me it seems that IT people overwhelmingly prefer Apple laptops now.
This is only true if you live in HN bubble.
I learned that outside of tech, Gemini is widely used in enterprise.
E.g. in the insurance company where my SO works, the major tasks are writing Gemini "gems" (some kind of prompts I think) and NotebookLM is a killer product for e.g. collecting and summarizing new laws, cross checking documents and what internal regulations are.
I then learned it's used in a chemistry consultancy company of a friend of mine to process reports. Flash and Pro models are also wildly popular in another European bank I know people in to assist in customer care (pre processing tickets before handing them to humans), translations, reporting, etc.
Google suite is already at the core of many businesses and Google easily adds these offerings without new contracting being needed.
Don't confuse our bubble with the real world. You can have a disaster product like teams and still dominate enterprise because you were already there with excel, outlook and SharePoint.
Gemini is so far behind it hurts. It's useful for daily tasks and simple questions, but it codes like a model from late 2024. I can't imagine using it for any serious work.
In general I agree, but I found last week it was able to solve some obscure Android bugs for me that both 5.5 and Opus whiffed on.
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xAI > Gooogle & DeepMind
I did not have this one on my 2026 bingo card.
That’s just not true. Google Brain/DeepMind came up with the attention mechanism to begin with… What a silly take.
Grok's latest model is objectively superior to any of the current Google models in the most relevant use cases. I don't like Elon musk but that does not change reality.
And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.
And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.
Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.
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