Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

Relatedly, when chatting with frontier models about science education content design, I've found it very helpful to mix in Chinese education terms. In English, for example, NGSS is such a massive attractor, discussing nearby topics often yields NGSS "slop". And "estimation" (educational) in the US means one (dysfunctional:) thing, which similarly distracts. Perhaps if AIs become increasingly multilingual, but remain weak at deep conceptual reasoning, it may be fruitful to have multilingual thesauruses, to use language-associated cultural conceptual differences as a way to convey conceptual nuances with which LLMs otherwise struggle?

How did the early Roman Empire interact with Greek city states?

How are LLMs planning on learning new information on the fly without new context or retraining runs?

Why did mom leave?

You know, standard stuff.

It tells me there's a Costco 10km from me and I'm like, yeah let's go there, that's the one I meant! And then it sends me to one that's like 40 minutes from me all across town and I'm like WTF?!

Never mind asking Android Auto any question that's not driving related. It just doesn't understand me at all. Or even some driving related ones. "Find Alternative route". "Sorry, I can't help you with that". WTF?

If you're really interested, shoot me an email.

However, if I want it to DO something then Gemini is in absolute last place. I don't trust it for anything more than renaming files that I don't care about very much or extracting data (though it's too expensive for data extraction at scale).

Occam's Razor is overwhelmingly that they just don't have the organisational capability to capture this market. If they did then they absolutely would have.

It would be utter stupidity if they keep competing with hyper agile frontier labs. They sensibly moving to big infra provider and that's good niche.

> .. perhaps if it's not helping sell ads,

Perhaps cloud business is also a thing which is making big revenue

Funny enough, after trying it, I went back to G3.8

I’ve been using Work for all my queries, since it seems to just be the same interface as Chat but with more features. I don’t understand why they’re two separate things.

Their AI leadership team has taken some hits recently too, in the form of departures. I believe when they get their bearings they will be competitive again. 3.8 Flash has been a great model for me.

Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.

When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.

well then its not model problem

And like, it does this despite it speaking in extremely dense math, which both makes it sound correct and requires a lot more effort to prove when it is wrong... yet, it isn't actually correct more often, and so that time sink just isn't worth the benefit. I then think many people--including people who can speak math (as can I)--just stop bothering to check everything, as if you come across a human who speaks like this it probably does correlate with slow and careful thought that helps prevent errors.

Instead, Claude has the mistake rate of a somewhat accelerated beginner impossibly combined with the language of an expert professor; and we as humans just aren't good at that combination: it becomes very dangerous and makes it take longer to spot its egregious mistakes and trained-in biases. If you have to use Claude, I thereby claim you really need to have a team of not-Claudes to help insulate you from this, and Gemini (while being a bit senile) is a lot more collaborative and approaches problems in ways that makes it harder to get tricked.

(To translate this into more of an engineering analogy: Claude always feels to me like the engineer who put more effort into learning how to program in functional languages than into how to actually develop working code, and then confidently presents you answers in Haskell or Lisp that never quite work. To find their errors is then very costly. In contrast, Gemini feels more like a Java or Go developer who knows they are a cog... that's helpful! <- Which maybe just goes to show that AI has finally turned me into a manager, omg.)

I'm not very happy with live conversations with Claude, so this seems like it might be a good option.

No one is behind grok. It literally has "be funny and irreverent when appropriate" (whatever the hell "when appropriate" means for them) baked into the system prompt. To me, that is all you need to know about how useful it is.

No serious people use it and the numbers bear it out tbh. It has the smallest market share of the "big companies" for a reason - and it's by a very, very large margin (~2.5% last I checked).

"It's AI but anyway", seems to be a way to use it, but not promote that your using it?

There's a significant amount of people in my friend group who don't like "AI", but everyone seems to use what google's doing, even if they add the "the AI said this" disclaimer to it.

Even the people who don't like 'AI', will still reference the LLM output, which seems like they're just slow to accept it, I guess.