Comment by Miraste
6 hours ago
That's the only explanation that makes sense. If it was frontier but cost or compute were limiting factors, they'd release it at an obscene price for the bragging rights. Google doesn't care that much about alignment, and I don't think it's likely to be significantly different than 3.5 anyway. The only reason it would need to be soft-canceled is if it's terrible, and has to end up in a ditch like Llama 4 to avoid shareholder panic.
3.5 pro was clearly a miss. It should have been in prod mid may, not MIA in late July. The brain drain at deep mind is a clear indicator that the people who know the most think that they can’t stay at the frontier.
Antigravity NEEDED to be game-changing. Without the stream of data that Claude, Codex, and Cursor enjoy there is little chance of getting an effective reinforcement learning loop. For the first time in its history, GOOG is at a meaningful data disadvantage, and apparently a cultural one as well.
"Without the stream of data that Claude, Codex, and Cursor enjoy there is little chance of getting an effective reinforcement learning loop"
Google literally giving everyone + student 18 month free subscription, those are source of cheap gemini + sonet,opus model that people selling/use with rotator proxy with thousands of account
they didn't lack the data
It's also what Pichai literally said in a recent interview, that Google is not doing well in coding and agentic tasks.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pichai-says-google-is-a-... (link to the actual podcast interview source within, this has a summary)
“Google doesn't care that much about alignment”
I don’t think this is necessarily true, did we all forget how much Google cared about alignment that their AI wasn’t able to render a white polar bear?