In my own experience, 2.5 Pro 03-26 was by far the best LLM model at the time. The newer models are quantized and distilled (I confirmed this with someone who

In my own experience, 2.5 Pro 03-26 was by far the best LLM model at the time. The newer models are quantized and distilled (I confirmed this with someone who works on the team), and are a significantly worse experience. I prefer OpenAI O3 and o4-mini models to Gemini 2.5 Pro for general knowledge tasks, and Sonnet 4 for coding.