Comment by drob518
15 days ago
My first reaction after reading the announcement post is that the coding scores look like a weak point.
15 days ago
My first reaction after reading the announcement post is that the coding scores look like a weak point.
Google is clearly not targeting coding. They don't have to. They're Google.
Coding is probably one of the worst value propositions, in terms of consuming more tokens per subscription dollar. Doing well in coding might even hurt Google's revenues: it would cannibalize some proportion of Anthropic's user base, which Anthropic serves by... renting Google's infra.
Gemini Flash 3.8 was heavily optimized for agentic coding. It is not an ignored use case. Flash 3.8 benches extremely well on agentic coding. It was very intentionally made good at coding. So was Argon. It is doing a lot of mission critical porting work for things like Rust. Does Google also build models for things other than coding? Yes. It has a lot of enterprise customers that need good general models too. IDK, I haven't seen anything convincing in Flash 3.8 or Argon that say "Google is ignoring coding" it just took a while to get there since Pro 3.1.
(Disclaimer: I work at teh Goog and spend... a lot of time with these models :)
2 replies →
Well done - youre the first poster Ive seen on here who delivered a short-sharp-nuanced analysis on this topic! Well done! (not sarcastic btw)
Wouldn't it be more profitable to have the user pay you for your model, running in your servers, than for a while separate company to try and make a profit out of being the middle-man?
I mean you'd have to crunch the numbers, but Anthropic would need one helluva advantage in efficiency before that would be cheaper to google than the full stack in house
There were rumors that the reason Gemini was delayed was because it was too bad at coding.