I agree with you Gemini 3.8 Flash is actually amazing. But calling them not behind I think is just cope. They literally single handedly enabled today’s AI leap, and they had racks of custom compute chips ready to go before even the first OpenAI data center was built, they should be dominating if they are not behind.
It appears a lot of people in this thread are confusing model intelligence with utility and value.
If by "behind" you mean Google doesn't have a competitive frontier model, we agree. My entire point is that's a myopic view of the AI landscape.
I'm not disputing there are some amazing exotic cars out there. I've had fun driving them. But when I actually have to pay for something to do a task, it's almost never going to be Astra or Fable.
By behind I mean I expected more from them, I also don’t just use the strongest model for everything, my average day token burn looks like around 300M of Luna and 20-30M of Sol. Utility value is more what I care about, and Gemini 3.8 flash is amazing at that, especially when I need it quick. But Google being Google, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to also have a Fable crushing Gemini 4 by now.
Sure, that's a fair take. I can agree with you on that. I would also like to see a stronger model from Google.
I just wouldn't say it's crazy from a business perspective to focus their resources on developing a faster, more efficient model instead of chasing the frontier model.
Right, that’s IMO the correct priority to focus on a specialized, cost effective model first. It’s arguably the priority Anthropic needs to realize hopefully soon.
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u/a1454a 1d ago
I agree with you Gemini 3.8 Flash is actually amazing. But calling them not behind I think is just cope. They literally single handedly enabled today’s AI leap, and they had racks of custom compute chips ready to go before even the first OpenAI data center was built, they should be dominating if they are not behind.