Comment by sid_talks
3 days ago
The Gemini Flash models makes perfect sense to me coming from a company like Google. Google AI Mode for search is a product I really find useful. It makes sense that Google focused on smaller, faster yet smart enough models that wouldn't break your bank on inference. It plays well into their product ecosystem.
Google AI Mode consistently gets me consistently good results and good speeds. It really changes what "googling" is for me.
I similarly have a weird affinity for Gemini that I can't really articulate. I used Gemini's free chat and found it great for exploring technical topics (and random one-off general walking-around-questions) and appreciated its speed, tone and accuracy. I spent a month playing with Gemini CLI / Antigravity and found it also an effective coding agent, at least for my workflow (entirely in the loop development and review). I also was really surprised that I could just paste it images of a project I was working on and have it immediately understand what it was looking at -- which I've come to learn is considered a unique strong point for Gemini. I've been playing with GPT5.6 for about a month and it's definitely powerful but I honestly think I'll go back to Gemini. There's something kind of charming about working with an AI that not only is particularly good at web search and information gathering, but also one that doesn't feel like some superhuman overengineering freak when it comes to code.
Well, Google is probably the only one among frontier model providers in the US that doesn't have a massive financial pressure to deliver business results ASAP (and this focus on agent coding and long-running agentic tasks), so Google is able to focus more on encoding deep scientific, cultural and historical knowledge to its systems. I'd assume DeepMind's focus on the scientific core also played a role in the tone and approach Gemini models take for explanations and Q&As.
I find that GPT models and Claude tend to talk in strong slangs and in-group jargon, but love Gemini's massive general knowledge corpus — reminds me of Richard Feynman from his lectures.
I like to think of Gemini as a broader generalist that hasn't allocated _most_ of its skillpoints to agentic coding execution :)
I like Gemini (I'm just a dumb person without knowledge of 'benchmarks' or how x compares to y) while understanding that shoving it into Google auto summaries has been a bad idea and produces inaccurate results