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Comment by anthonypasq

3 days ago

flash-lite is more of their luna tier competitor but even still not quite there yet, but gemini's dominance on multimodal and image understanding i think really gets downplayed on this site when most people think the only think you can do with LLMs is write code

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anthonypasq

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WarmWash  3 days ago

Ultimately it would track that in the real world, people will want to point cameras at things and get answers.

I pay for ChatGPT and Gemini, and while Sol is a total beast with anything text, it still poisoned my cucumber bed. Which I will be bitter about for at least a few years while the bed recovers. Gemini (even flash) is exceptionally talented at viewing photos and telling you what to do/what it is (and telling me I just misidentified the problem with my cucumbers and spraying off the "bugs" actually just spread the bacteria everywhere.)

  • rolisz  3 days ago

    Tell me more about your cucumber bed. We started some raised veggie beds this year and my wife is relying very heavily in ChatGPT and Claude for advice on how to deal with issues.

    • WarmWash  3 days ago

      5.6 Sol was confident that I had a mite problem, as evidenced by the yellow spots on the leaves. I flipped over the leaves and saw a few small bugs, and relayed this to 5.6 who said that they can be difficult to see since they are so small. The remedy was to blast the underside of all the leaves to wash off all the mites, which I diligently did.

      However afterwards, still feeling odd that I didn't see many bugs, I double checked with Gemini who is my typical standby for vision tasks. Gemini pointed out that its actually the fungus Corynespora cassiicola...which spreads by water splashing, and can live in your bed for years once it gets into the soil.

      So now having two answers I need to research and check myself, and sure enough, it was obvious match for the fungus and didn't look much at all like the mite damage.

      There is another story a few days later of 5.6 looking at my heatpump install and telling me it was probably borked and to call an expert. Gemini told me to just open a valve and it was good.

      I don't really trust any other LLM besides gemini for vision stuff. It also tracks as google is the only lab still pursuing vision related tasks.

vohk  3 days ago

That's been my association as well. I see Flash get brought up a lot in relation to things like OCR and PDF processing frequently, and a lot of other routine multimodal workloads.

bitexploder  3 days ago

Flash models and Gemini make more sense when you consider Gemini Enterprise and Workspace. Oh HN we generally care a lot about writing software. However, until Fable, Gemini 3.1 Pro was my default for doing any sort of discussion outside of software engineering. Fable is now on par with things like modifying cars, etc. But I am guessing Fable is a /lot/ more expensive to use.

And in a typical enterprise environment dealing with documents, images, and broader business reasoning skills matter. Agents are not just for code and text :)

MrBuddyCasino  3 days ago

Yes this is my impression as well. To be fair I didn't compare to Luna yet, but Gemini 3.5 Lite is a very good and cheap multi-modal data extraction model.