4 ms·

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with

by LarsDu88 10mo ago

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology. It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once. That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her millions in the divorce proceedings to get RFK Jr into a cabinet level position to gut billions in research spending. :(

dyauspitr 10mo ago
I’m not going to attribute Gemini’s success to Sergey. It was already basically there before he came back.
- LarsDu88 10mo ago
  Well all the core people left to do other shit, and when Sergey came back, some of those people were hired back for exorbitant sums of money
m348e912 10mo ago
I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.
- spiderfarmer 10mo ago
  You must be using it to create bombs or something. I never ran into an issue that I would blame on policy guardrails.
- energy123 10mo ago
  It's the best model pound for pound, but I find GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro to be more useful for serious work when run with xhigh effort. I can get it to think for 20 minutes, but Gemini 3.0 Pro is like 2.5 minutes max. Obviously I lack full visibility because tok/s and token efficiency likely differs between them, but I take it as a proxy of how much compute they're giving us per inference, and it matches my subjective judgement of output quality. Maybe Google nerfs the reasoning effort in the Gemini subscription to save money and that's why I am experiencing this.
  - cj 10mo ago
    I'm curious, what types of prompts are you running that benefit from 10+ minutes of think time? Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day? I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
    - energy123 10mo ago
      It's for planning system architecture when I want to get something good (along the criteria that I give it) rather than the first thing that runs. I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it. In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
      - Version467 10mo ago
        I recently bought into the $200 tier and was genuinely quite surprised at ChatGPT 5.2 Pros ability for software architecture planning. If you give it ~60k tokens of your codebase and a thorough description of what you actually want to happen then it comes up with very good ideas. The biggest difference to me is how thorough it is. This is already something I noticed with the codex high/xhigh models compared to gemini 3 pro and opus 4.5, but gpt pro is noticeably better still. I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
  - knowriju 10mo ago
- eru 10mo ago
  > [...] I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. For a while people couldn't see how Google could catch up, either. Have a bit of imagination. In any case, I welcome the renewed intense competition.
- jart 10mo ago
  It's the worst thing ever. The amount of disrespect that robot shows you, when you talk the least bit weird or deviant, it just shows you a terrifying glimpse of a future that must be snuffed out immediately. I honestly think we wouldn't have half the people who so virulently hate AI if OpenAI hadn't designed ChatGPT to be this way. This isn't how people have normally reacted to next-generation level technologies being introduced in the past, like telephones, personal computers, Google Search, and iPhone. OpenAI has managed to turn something great into a true horror of horrors that's disturbed many of us to the foundation of our beings and elicited this powerful sentiment of rejection. It's humanity's duty that GPT should fall now so that better robots like Gemini can take its place.
  - pardon_me 9mo ago
    It's called OPEN AI and started as a charity for humanitarian reasons. How could it possibly be bad?!
    - jart 9mo ago
      That's apparently how you pull the wool over the eyes of the world's smartest people. To be fair something like it needed to happen, because the fear everyone had ten years ago of creating a product like ChatGPT wasn't entirely rational. However the way OpenAI unblocked building it unfairly undermined the legitimacy of the open source movement by misappropriating their good name.
- solarkraft 10mo ago
  FWIW, my productivity tanks when my Claude allowance dries up in Antigravity. I don’t get the hype for Gemini for coding at all, it just does random crap for me - if it doesn’t throw itself into a loop immediately, which it did like all of the times I gave it yet another chance.
alex1138 10mo ago
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- alex1138 10mo ago
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  - alex1138 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tombert 10mo ago
      You could just edit your first comment instead of replying to yourself multiple times. I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb. He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.
      - alex1138 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        tombert 10mo ago
        I'm sorry, I don't seem to recall mentioning anything about COVID. Let me check my reply....nope! I mentioned stuff that happened in the last year. So even if you were right about COVID, what you just wrote isn't a rebuttable to anything I said. Though I suspect you know that. It's almost like your response is dishonestly trying to muddy the waters.
nsoonhui 10mo ago
Sergey might have some positive influence on Gemini, but given that he isn't an AI scientist ( AKA no technical background), I really do wonder what sort of influence that (only) he could have had, beyond just bringing in key people.
- slyall 10mo ago
  I assume by "no technical background" you mean he doesn't have a PHD in AI. He's probably not developing the low-level algorithms but he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so. He's also perfectly able to spend 60 hours a week improving his AI skills using the best teachers in the world.
  - almostgotcaught 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - slyall 10mo ago
      I'm not sure what you mean by "he literally can't and he literally doesn't" but he's got PHD in CompSci and did everything at Google in the past from writing complex code himself to managing small teams to managing huge teams. Exactly what do you think he can't do? Certainly he's well qualified to manage a team of a few thousand (?) AI people and understand what they are talking about and get the best out of them. Like Batman he has the superpower of money. If he has gaps he can pay (or otherwise arrange) for someone with those skills to 1-1 coach him in them. He's not trying to become a top researcher, he's trying to learn enough to understand what they are talking about and be able to make decisions around say what areas should be pursued.
      - almostgotcaught 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        dang 10mo ago
drewda 10mo ago
It's not just millions. Shanahan received over a billion dollars when divorcing Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money. It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)
- ngcazz 10mo ago
  While Brin comes back to Google to advocate for 60h workweeks as it lays off thousands of employees.
  - neilv 10mo ago
    I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment. I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though. I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
    - ngcazz 10mo ago
      Okay? I'm not making a point about how long individuals should want to spend working (although this being 2026 I believe it should be less not more) Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
      - 10mo ago
vjk800 10mo ago
I've been a huge sceptic of the whole AI hype since the beginning now. Whenever I've tried any of the AI tools, the results have just been underwhelming. However, two weeks ago I tried Gemini (the pro version) and have been using it for various, random tasks and questions since then, and I've been pretty impressed. There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations. I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).

dyauspitr 10mo ago

I’m not going to attribute Gemini’s success to Sergey. It was already basically there before he came back.

LarsDu88 10mo ago
Well all the core people left to do other shit, and when Sergey came back, some of those people were hired back for exorbitant sums of money

m348e912 10mo ago

I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.

spiderfarmer 10mo ago
You must be using it to create bombs or something. I never ran into an issue that I would blame on policy guardrails.
energy123 10mo ago
It's the best model pound for pound, but I find GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro to be more useful for serious work when run with xhigh effort. I can get it to think for 20 minutes, but Gemini 3.0 Pro is like 2.5 minutes max. Obviously I lack full visibility because tok/s and token efficiency likely differs between them, but I take it as a proxy of how much compute they're giving us per inference, and it matches my subjective judgement of output quality. Maybe Google nerfs the reasoning effort in the Gemini subscription to save money and that's why I am experiencing this.
- cj 10mo ago
  I'm curious, what types of prompts are you running that benefit from 10+ minutes of think time? Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day? I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
  - energy123 10mo ago
    It's for planning system architecture when I want to get something good (along the criteria that I give it) rather than the first thing that runs. I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it. In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
    - Version467 10mo ago
      I recently bought into the $200 tier and was genuinely quite surprised at ChatGPT 5.2 Pros ability for software architecture planning. If you give it ~60k tokens of your codebase and a thorough description of what you actually want to happen then it comes up with very good ideas. The biggest difference to me is how thorough it is. This is already something I noticed with the codex high/xhigh models compared to gemini 3 pro and opus 4.5, but gpt pro is noticeably better still. I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
- knowriju 10mo ago
eru 10mo ago
> [...] I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. For a while people couldn't see how Google could catch up, either. Have a bit of imagination. In any case, I welcome the renewed intense competition.
jart 10mo ago
It's the worst thing ever. The amount of disrespect that robot shows you, when you talk the least bit weird or deviant, it just shows you a terrifying glimpse of a future that must be snuffed out immediately. I honestly think we wouldn't have half the people who so virulently hate AI if OpenAI hadn't designed ChatGPT to be this way. This isn't how people have normally reacted to next-generation level technologies being introduced in the past, like telephones, personal computers, Google Search, and iPhone. OpenAI has managed to turn something great into a true horror of horrors that's disturbed many of us to the foundation of our beings and elicited this powerful sentiment of rejection. It's humanity's duty that GPT should fall now so that better robots like Gemini can take its place.
- pardon_me 9mo ago
  It's called OPEN AI and started as a charity for humanitarian reasons. How could it possibly be bad?!
  - jart 9mo ago
    That's apparently how you pull the wool over the eyes of the world's smartest people. To be fair something like it needed to happen, because the fear everyone had ten years ago of creating a product like ChatGPT wasn't entirely rational. However the way OpenAI unblocked building it unfairly undermined the legitimacy of the open source movement by misappropriating their good name.
solarkraft 10mo ago
FWIW, my productivity tanks when my Claude allowance dries up in Antigravity. I don’t get the hype for Gemini for coding at all, it just does random crap for me - if it doesn’t throw itself into a loop immediately, which it did like all of the times I gave it yet another chance.

alex1138 10mo ago

[flagged]

alex1138 10mo ago
[flagged]
- alex1138 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tombert 10mo ago
    You could just edit your first comment instead of replying to yourself multiple times. I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb. He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.
    - alex1138 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - tombert 10mo ago
        I'm sorry, I don't seem to recall mentioning anything about COVID. Let me check my reply....nope! I mentioned stuff that happened in the last year. So even if you were right about COVID, what you just wrote isn't a rebuttable to anything I said. Though I suspect you know that. It's almost like your response is dishonestly trying to muddy the waters.

nsoonhui 10mo ago

Sergey might have some positive influence on Gemini, but given that he isn't an AI scientist ( AKA no technical background), I really do wonder what sort of influence that (only) he could have had, beyond just bringing in key people.

slyall 10mo ago
I assume by "no technical background" you mean he doesn't have a PHD in AI. He's probably not developing the low-level algorithms but he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so. He's also perfectly able to spend 60 hours a week improving his AI skills using the best teachers in the world.
- almostgotcaught 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - slyall 10mo ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "he literally can't and he literally doesn't" but he's got PHD in CompSci and did everything at Google in the past from writing complex code himself to managing small teams to managing huge teams. Exactly what do you think he can't do? Certainly he's well qualified to manage a team of a few thousand (?) AI people and understand what they are talking about and get the best out of them. Like Batman he has the superpower of money. If he has gaps he can pay (or otherwise arrange) for someone with those skills to 1-1 coach him in them. He's not trying to become a top researcher, he's trying to learn enough to understand what they are talking about and be able to make decisions around say what areas should be pursued.
    - almostgotcaught 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 10mo ago

drewda 10mo ago

It's not just millions. Shanahan received over a billion dollars when divorcing Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money. It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)

ngcazz 10mo ago
While Brin comes back to Google to advocate for 60h workweeks as it lays off thousands of employees.
- neilv 10mo ago
  I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment. I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though. I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
  - ngcazz 10mo ago
    Okay? I'm not making a point about how long individuals should want to spend working (although this being 2026 I believe it should be less not more) Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
    - 10mo ago

vjk800 10mo ago

I've been a huge sceptic of the whole AI hype since the beginning now. Whenever I've tried any of the AI tools, the results have just been underwhelming. However, two weeks ago I tried Gemini (the pro version) and have been using it for various, random tasks and questions since then, and I've been pretty impressed. There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations. I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).