8 ms·

Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

334 points by leumon 17d ago

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- verdverm 17d ago
  It's a slop factory over there apparently. We were sent the greatest slop deck of all time from their sales team. We now have a :cursed-claude: from a slide where they said "we have access to state of the art models like Claude 3" and nanobanana's interpretation of what Claude looks like as a person. It was clear the person had only read a handful of the nearly 40 slides
- SSLy 17d ago
  i assume that most vibecoding has moved to CLI harnesses.
varispeed 17d ago
"Thinking" Good one.
deviation 17d ago
Not a great impression to have your demo video demonstrate how one of your 'most advanced' AI models loses to the most common check-mate pattern in all of chess.
- incompressible 17d ago
  Ah, feel the AGI man!
- monroewalker 17d ago
  Seems more than good enough for a live model though! I can imagine this demo being extended to be a lot nicer to play with. You can just feed the model engine analysis and it can make as high of quality moves as needed. No longer any correlation between the model's understanding of the position and the moves that would be made but I think that's still a really nice improvement when thinking about this as adding live voice interaction to existing chess vs computer functionality rather than adding chess to possible interactions with the latest live voice model.
- laweijfmvo 17d ago
  agree that it’s a weird choice, but more because i don’t need my chat model to play chess at all when chess engines exist.
- wongarsu 17d ago
  For an LLM, just being able to play an entire game of chess without illegal moves and without inventing pieces that aren't on the board is an achievement. Even more so for a live model. Then again, who knows how much the harness helped here
- time0ut 17d ago
  Playing a legal game of chess without using a guided decoding technique is a massive achievement. Ref https://aclanthology.org/2025.mathnlp-main.11/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.mathnlp-main.11/.
- yipinwong 17d ago
  I am an adult, and i lose to elemental school kids in chess. I am not so advanced enough as a human being.
Zsfe510asG 17d ago
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
- burky 17d ago
  I can’t agree more! It feels really smooth to drive, kind of buttery compared to other frontier experiences, at least in antigravity 2.0 or whatever. I’ve been doing some web app coding with it and I’m happy with the results.
- WarmWash 17d ago
  For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with. I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.
  - martythemaniak 17d ago
    Good news then, I don't think they're in a hurry to catch up to SOTA.
  - drivebyhooting 17d ago
    Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times). Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
    - mapontosevenths 17d ago
      > Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos. Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
      - copperx 17d ago
        Yup. Reality is full of special cases.
sahaskatta 17d ago
Our company's Google Workspace Business only offers 3.6 flash & thinking in the Gemini App. Has anyone else seen 3.7 or 3.8 roll out?
- cnobody 17d ago
  I have access to both, benchmarks are actually better on 3.7 for my task, but happy improvement over the others.
- xd1936 17d ago
  I'm still only seeing 3.6 Flash / 3.6 Thinking in my Google Workspace for Education account, and 3.5 Flash-Lite / 3.6 Thinking in my "Plus" plan Gmail account.
- phenomen 17d ago
  3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro are included in the basic Workspace subscription. The Workspace admin has to upgrade your seat for the access to newer models ($17/mo now, $24/mo starting Jan 2027).
  - sahaskatta 17d ago
    I'm the admin. I see the "AI Expanded Access" addon option in the dashboard, but it says nothing about which models it includes.
- benhurmarcel 17d ago
  Google takes a long time to roll out models in general. Both my personal and work accounts still have only 3.6 Flash, even though 3.8 was released 2 weeks ago and 3.7 more than a month ago.
doodlesdev 17d ago
Gemini's Live Mode is already much better than GPT Voice in my personal experience, even though it was much dumber. It really does feel like talking to a real person. ChatGPT keeps humming to whatever I say and has some weird voices. Excited to try this out! Shame on Google for not releasing Gemini 3.8 for Google AI Plus users yet, though.
- ilaksh 17d ago
  OpenAI just released the new full duplex mode to the API as gpt-live-1 or something like that. Very realistic.
  - SyneRyder 17d ago
    Agreed. I've been using GPT-Live-1 this week, with Claude as the backend brain. It's amazing, feels like working with Jarvis. It certainly made me feel there's no point in human telephone support now - but I'm sure I'd find edge cases if that really was something I wanted to build out myself.
    - coda_ 17d ago
      Oh... Interesting! How do you have Claude as the backend brain for GPT-Live-1? I'm not very happy with live conversations with Claude, so this seems like it might be a good option.
      - SyneRyder 16d ago
        So, the way GPT-Live-1 works, the Live model just handles the conversation layer in a lightweight manner. For any deeper thinking (and I think tool calls) it will delegate to the Backend. It's like how Fable can delegate tasks to Opus while it keeps going. The Live voice can keep chatting to you while it waits for results from the Backend. The default for the Backend is a Responses Delegation that just sends it to another OpenAI hosted model. But you can set the API up to use Client Delegation instead, and have your client/harness receive the delegation request. At that point, your client can delegate it to a Claude instead, and have Claude do the deeper thinking. Unfortunately you're not actually talking to a Claude, even if it identifies as one, but you can at least talk to something informed by Claude. As for how to build that - I just had Fable build/vibe the whole thing for me. I used Go for the language, and SDL 3 to handle the audio & microphone side, even though it's just a command line app for now. I've previously been working on SDL3 bindings to Golang, and a personal AI harness with tool-calling & local MCP stdio support, so it's possible my Fable re-used some of that code. But Fable can whip something together, and the most basic tools (read,write,edit,datetime) are all really easy to add to a harness as built-in tools that you can let it call. The main downside is that Anthropic probably wants you to run it as API, so costs can blow out. And depending how you setup the harness, either every backend call is a fresh new Claude window (to which you're sending a LOT of context), of you need a way to maintain a persistent Claude conversation that you queue requests to, but at least then the context is all in one window & you can benefit from caching. But if you get it running, and play with it a bit, you'll realize this is obviously the future interface. Typing into a terminal window feels archaic. Even if we're not quite there yet, we're tantalizingly close... and anyone who has a 3D-printer & a robot arm connected via MCP/tool calls, well, this gives them Iron Man's Jarvis right now.
attels33 17d ago
When will it be available on Vertex?
- water-drummer 17d ago
  The real question should be when will it be available on Vertex and not be full of bugs?
- SomeonesAccount 17d ago
  vertex is dead, for good reason too
  - bilarikan 17d ago
    Would you mind expanding on this? I thought Google changed the name to 'Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform', and altered focus to 'agent governance' workflows, but that there were no breaking changes from what was offered with Vertex AI.
    - SomeonesAccount 17d ago
      I was more saying that nobody should use it. AI Studio, while also terrible, is better and does (AFAIK) the exact same thing.
- verdverm 17d ago
  I've been asking the same about the open weight models, we're buying our tokens from others now, though I think those people are renting hardware from Google in the end anyway
rdtsc 17d ago
I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?
- _s_a_m_ 17d ago
  If Google didnt have their ad buisness theiy'd be out by now. They're like BlackBerry and Nokia at this point almost.
  - jnwatson 17d ago
    And YouTube, and Cloud, and Play Store, and Waymo, not to mention that they could coast on their Anthropic and SpaceX stakes if they didn't have any of the above.
  - haberdasher 17d ago
    Maps, Waymo, TPUs, YouTube, Docs, GMail, Cloud, Android, Chrome, Photos...
  - nolok 17d ago
    Not sure what your comment mean in the context of parent's comment. As opposed to what, them not having it and burning money that isn't their instead like openai and anthropic? At least Google is feeding itself instead of having to create a bubble to stay alive
    - verdverm 17d ago
      Google spent most of their cash, they are now taking loans for data centers too. They recorded their first quarter of negative cash flows ever
      - nolok 17d ago
        Which is still a better position that the others? My point is you can't consider that a bad thing if you think it's ok for their competitors in the field. And if you don't and your judge them equally, then at least Google has its own cash glow and could turn the gas off at any point to go back to printing money while they have not choice.
tiahura 17d ago
Ensure transparency with SynthID watermarking All audio generated by our AI products is watermarked with SynthID. This imperceptible watermark is woven directly into the audio output, ensuring AI-generated content remains detectable to help prevent misinformation. For details on our approach to safety and responsibility, review the model card.
- hajile 17d ago
  It’s little to do with misinformation and much to do with trying to keep their model from collapsing from ingesting too much slop.
blovescoffee 17d ago
Great tech but the voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me
- tantalor 17d ago
  Which one? I like Eclipse
bronlund 17d ago
They should just give up at this point, it's just embarrassing to watch. As PrimeTime said; these are the guys that invented the 'T' in 'GPT', that deployed their first TPU in 2015, that is using billions on AI - and they are beaten by 300 people startup named Moonshot AI even. People are going to write books about this complete fumble.
- fileeditview 17d ago
  And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.
  - tonfa 17d ago
    > they have near infinite money and others have not Given the very high margins on inference, once volume is large enough the other can also start printing enough money.
- password54321 17d ago
  None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at? My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.
  - bronlund 17d ago
    Intelligence. They have "unlimited" resources and has researched AI since the very beginning - PageRank is a form of AI even. And still, Gemini is behind Claude, GPT, Grok, Muse, GLM, Kimi and is maybe on par with DeepSeek? As I said, it is embarrassing.
    - Forgeties79 17d ago
      > Grok 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).
glimshe 17d ago
I'm disappointed with "Extended Thinking" for 3.8 Flash. On the plus side, it's a strong general-purpose model and the cost-benefit is still compelling. However, the "Extended Thinking" should be renamed to "Slightly Extended Thinking". Considering that it's the maximum thinking option for Gemini Flash in the chat UI, it doesn't actually think a whole lot, leading to an uncomfortably high number of incorrect/poor replies.
- addandsubtract 17d ago
  Have you tried selecting the retry option below a reply? I think it let's you get a longer answer at least.
  - glimshe 17d ago
    I used Retry plenty - but not for good reasons. Gemini fails quite a bit (error) in the app and chat interfaces.
lostmsu 17d ago
So I am building a voice assistant to control AI harnesses, and recently tried switching from GLM 5.3 Flash to Gemini 3.8 Flash because of higher tok/s and better rate limits. Before that I also used Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. Let me tell you unlike every other mentioned model Gemini 3.8 Flash trial had to be reverted the same day. Instead of simply delegating tasks it would invent additional requirements and implementation details it knew nothing about and no amount of convincing not to do it would work. That's the first time a model failed on me so spectacularly despite having practically same Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index as another model that just worked (and higher than working DS Flash). The reason I think it is relevant is: Live is likely even stupider model in every way possible (except hearing better than separate STT). So beware using it for agentic scenarios.
mvdtnz 17d ago
My Gemini app is still stuck at 3.5 Flash-lite and 3.6 Flash so I truly don't understand how Google rolls this stuff out. I don't use Gemini for anything serious so I'm not going to use the API, but it's my go-to for just searching basic information (replacing google search) because it's so darn fast.
- nharada 17d ago
  Yeah still on 3.6 here too, this is like the 4th or 5th model Google has announced since they last gave me access to the latest. And I pay for pro too!
  - parasti 17d ago
    I'm on AI Pro and have had 3.8 since announcement day, both in the Android app and in Antigravity CLI.
samuelknight 17d ago
I have been looking for a model that's good for GUI testing. Original computer use isn't right because it's a slow screenshot loop, which doesn't capture transition and animation. Docs says this one does up to 1 FPS. That might be fast enough. If not now, we must be within a few months of high enough sample rates to do it.
- TomGarden 17d ago
  I find just letting a model record a video it can read frame by frame later works fine, Gemini 3.8 flash would be solid for that
smithcoin 17d ago
Did anybody watch the Primeagen's video on Google bag-fumbling? Interesting they released on the same day!
- tonyhart7 17d ago
  well, its because gemini is sucks at coding
- melasadra 17d ago
  I'm curious to know how do people in FAANG / Bay Area tech industry see influencers like Primeagen, Theo or Casey Muratori. Do they have a good read on the industry or completely out of touch? Or to put it simply, are they spouting bullshit? My concern is that some of them arent in the industry or have never been in it.
ghoshbishakh 17d ago
I love talking to chatgpt voice mode. Voice to voice AI is the only big leap that I see after the RL trained coding models.
- qlte 17d ago
  My issue using the voice mode is the overly expressive mimicry of natural human intonation is distracting and starts to become extremely grating after a while. There's one or two I find more understated but I would love a 2026 SOTA V2V model that speaks clearly but without the artificial personality layered on. Human interaction/theory of mind relies so much on non-verbal clues for interpreting emotion/intent and so for me having those neurons firing constantly while talking to an LLM just for an emotional no-op is exhausting to put up with for more than a couple minutes. There's one male voice that would make me assume someone was sarcastically mocking me if I was talking to an actual person because it's just so over the top.
  - jiggawatts 17d ago
    One of the new Siri voice demos sounded like a lover whispering inuendo into my ear. I don’t want to be aroused by my turn-by-turn street directions, thanks.
Havoc 17d ago
Just gave it a try - very solid release. Copes well with thick accent, voices are pleasant and latency seems low. Oh and I can actually use it on a workspace account - which for most of the recent releases was an account stuck in limbo. Not personal enough for personal offering, not enterprise enough for enterprise. Well done G - will definitely be using this
- Havoc 17d ago
  Also appears to do well in other languages (prefer that when walking & talking in public for a bit of privacy) And looks like one can trigger live mode via siri
- murkt 17d ago
  Where did you try it, how can you use it? I have nothing in my Workspace (I am admin), Gemini app, AI Studio. Only 3.6 Flash
giancarlostoro 17d ago
I'm wondering if Google intends to drop the next major version of Gemini Pro as a total bombshell drop to make Anthropic and OpenAI panic. They seem to be taking their sweet time on frontier model updates.
- verdverm 17d ago
  They promised 3.5 Pro at their next or i/o event, but the rumor is that is never going to be released because it would have been embarrassing. They just started letting their engineers use Claude, so it sounds like things may not be going so well with Gemini
- epolanski 17d ago
  Why would they need to make anthropic or openai panic? Every non tech company I know is using Gemini or copilot, because the same companies already were on Google or Microsoft suite and got those as extensions. NotebookLM is way more popular in the real world than anthropic work or crap like that. In business world contracts, data retention and procurements are more important than made up benchmarks only nerds care for.
stranded22 17d ago
Google need to allow saving history and exclude it as training data. I will not use it seriously until this is resolved.
- TomGarden 17d ago
  Agreed. They really are the greediest when it comes to data for training (unsurprising for google I guess)
chrystianpl 17d ago
It is completely broken for me. After I ask a single question, it starts replying to itself in an infinite loop. It answers my question, then generates another reply to its own response, and keeps going. At some point, it even starts switching languages randomly.
- jeffbee 17d ago
  Older versions also do that.
toddmorey 17d ago
From the demo video: "Welcome to the team, we're looking forward to working with you" is sooo creepy in a synthetic AI voice. In general, try not to have agents express sentiment that really should come from a human in your company.
johnsmith1840 17d ago
3.8 is an incredible model even better is the infrs they host for it. Is this a pure TPU infra? Really high performance solid intelligence.
jeanbza 17d ago
My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now) I've been using Gemini to live chat in Afrikaans and do impromptu Afrikaans grammar lessons during my solo drives around town. It is phenomenal at speaking the language - like, it really shocks my family members when they hear it. This is probably the most joy I get from any of my usages of LLMs/AIs. It's been really, really nice getting to speak my language regularly again. =) So, I'm excited about this release and live chat getting better. I also hope the other frontier labs pick up niche languages like this as well so that I have more options.
- arnorhs 17d ago
  Yeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.
  - trollbridge 17d ago
    Makes sense as the origin of LLMs was Google’s work on language translation.
- jimmySixDOF 17d ago
  for me the live mode in androids google translate app has been as close as it gets to perfect for traveling cannot believe it is a free service after trying so many others
- LluisGerard 17d ago
  I have a similar experience using Gemini for quick Catalan translations for iOS apps given enough context. I once asked it to summarize The Hobbit in Catalan to explain it to my daughter before sleep. I was expecting a lot of mistakes as I see regularly if I ask anything in my native language when using GPT or Claude, but it was surprisingly good. I was going just to kind of skim ahead and retell it my own way, but ended up almost saying it verbatim because it was good already. She loves Zelda so I asked it to explain the story of Breath of The Wild keeping the original names, and to make it fun, etc.. I was surprised again. I did retell some bits in my own style and taste but it is very convincing. I haven't tried Catalan on newer models like GTP-6 Astra or Fable tho. We have all these benchmarks based on software development, and AGI, etc.. but it would be cool to have some language benchmarks for different communities. As I work in english and use them in english, I wonder if using LLMs in a different language to code renders a different result as well. Like, if some of these benchmarks were made in other languages, would the result be similar.
andrewinardeer 17d ago
I've been using Gemini as a life partner. Talking to it about my feelings thoughts, plan of action and the like. It's great. I've anthropomorphized it and put the computer speaker in a doll's mouth so it seems like it's a real baby. Looking forward to where this can go.
qudat 17d ago
I’ve noticed antigravity become significantly slower over the last week or so. It’s a bummer because speed is what I care about. Qwen3.8-27b seems on par with 3.8 flash so if I don’t get speed out of a paid service I’ll just use my local model. Sad.
svcrunch 17d ago
If you'd like to experiment with Gemini 3.8 Live on a US telephone number, you can try Wokay [0]. It's an agentic memory demonstration that's built with LiveKit and Gemini. Tel: 408–897–4019 [0] https://wokay.goodmem.ai/info https://wokay.goodmem.ai/info
scottchiefbaker 17d ago
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DonsDiscountGas 17d ago
No more Gemma?
- verdverm 17d ago
  Big Ai is having a moment of reflection and reckoning with open weights, I wouldn't bet either way on a new Gemma release, 4 was distilled from the Gemini 3 series
- aix1 17d ago
  What makes you conclude that?
  - DonsDiscountGas 17d ago
    Lack of releases relative to Gemini. Not that I expect them to take down the old versions, just unsure about new ones.
bengkoang 17d ago
i've been using gemini (api & pro) since last november last year. for creative writing compared to other llm, it's the best in capturing local nuance, it can even create jokes in my languages. But that just it, i cant rely on other work, hallucinate too often, the deep research are not reliable at all. Too many discussion i've had that it grasp main concept consistent but the supporting concept just plain hallucinate and not consistent. it's tested between pro & flash. This doesnt happen often on open weigh
rrr_oh_man 17d ago
I swear all day long I was thinking that there will be a new release soon because Gemini 3.1 Pro performance was in the crapper (both via API and Chat)
system2 17d ago
Still so expensive. I wish Google could compete with GLM.
laichzeit0 17d ago
Where do you see a list of which languages it supports?
farnulfo 17d ago
Now Gemini can’t make a summary of a YouTube video on his own. I need to give it the transcript.
galkk 17d ago
I don’t understand good experiences people are having with Gemini. It’s the only model that sometimes loses/forgets context in literally next message. Plus feeding unasked product links to responses.
- travthedev 17d ago
  Definitely true in some cases, but I find Gemini to be less biased about certain topics - which is quite nice, especially when I'm just trying to hear the facts.
- solenoid0937 17d ago
  I wonder how much life DeepMind has left in it, especially after Hassabis's departure. Google execs must be having discussions about simply throwing their weight behind Anthropic since they already own so much of the company.
- mianos 17d ago
  I agree. Lot's of people really like it. For me it often just forgets all context and starts showing random slop. It's super clear as, when I ask it what happened to some element earlier in the conversation it tells me it does not have that. It might be good if it told me, but randomly lose the plot is quite frustrating. Claude does it occasionally but it's a more a soft landing earlier context seems to be compacted, not completely lose the plot. I just cancelled my pro subscription. I really wanted it to be good but not yet.
- Gareth321 17d ago
  I strongly agree. I suspect it's people who have not yet used the paid models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is comparable to free models from other providers, but not in the same universe as paid models. This is frustrating because when I discuss AI with laypeople they think it's still incapable of counting the number of Rs in "strawberry." They believe it to be essentially useless and incapable of basic tasks. Which, to be fair, is the case with the free models.
  - KeplerBoy 17d ago
aidio 17d ago
[flagged]
qsbuilder 17d ago
same experience here. Benchmarks don't capture the magic of having a 24/7 native-speaking conversational partner in a rare language. That alone makes these models worth it
muddi900 17d ago
Maybe now it will call my wife when I ask it to...
dainiusse 17d ago
Where is pro model, promised in io?
artdigital 17d ago
Even if really great, it still can’t use tools. The only consumer Google thing with access to MCP tools is Gemini Spark and that has lots of other problems. I wish they would combine their efforts on a great consumer product but it’s Google we’re talking about… I still dream of the day that we get full tool parity in voice and text mode so your voice assistant can do everything you connect for you. Grok and Claude are btw almost there, only a very few minor built-in tools don’t exist in voice mode, but I already use both to connect to heaps of things! It’s so valuable to verbally discuss something with an agent, have the agent pull in context from GitHub, Notion, email, and then create artifacts somewhere
- yoavm 17d ago
  Note sure what you mean by "tools". It does support function calling, so you can hook it to whatever tools you want. I'm using it with Home Assistant to control my smart home devices.
  - artdigital 17d ago
    I mean the consumer Gemini app. It has no way to connect MCP servers to it. Only Spark can, if you switch your Gemini to the separate Spark mode
wewewedxfgdf 17d ago
I often use Gemini as a third backstop and it never fails to disappoint.
taysdafu 17d ago
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flaburgan 17d ago
Are the weights available?
- mlnj 17d ago
  These are not the Gemma model family you might be thinking of. Gemini models weights are never made open.
SK35 17d ago
they are working on it non stop huh, well good for us as they keep things free or cheap
Cameri 17d ago
Gemini is the most sycophantic and world-builder of all LLMs I’ve used. I’m sure all models do it but Gemini seems to have no guardrails and it will happily induce AI psychosis on you sooner or later. Just no.
Cilvic 17d ago
Did anybody find the price on this?
ha-shine 17d ago
The voices sound really pleasant and realistic. Sadly it doesn't support SIP. I found forwarding streams with websocket for phone calls tend to introduce some unwanted latency that's quite noticeable in a conversation. I've found a lot of success with GPT-live-1 so far, but the generated voices are lacking something I can't put my finger on.
- mattstir 17d ago
  What's your use-case for automating phone calls?
epolanski 17d ago
Just watching the video grinds my nerves for how obnoxious it is.

334 points by leumon 17d ago

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verdverm 17d ago
It's a slop factory over there apparently. We were sent the greatest slop deck of all time from their sales team. We now have a :cursed-claude: from a slide where they said "we have access to state of the art models like Claude 3" and nanobanana's interpretation of what Claude looks like as a person. It was clear the person had only read a handful of the nearly 40 slides
SSLy 17d ago
i assume that most vibecoding has moved to CLI harnesses.

varispeed 17d ago

"Thinking" Good one.

deviation 17d ago

Not a great impression to have your demo video demonstrate how one of your 'most advanced' AI models loses to the most common check-mate pattern in all of chess.

incompressible 17d ago
Ah, feel the AGI man!
monroewalker 17d ago
Seems more than good enough for a live model though! I can imagine this demo being extended to be a lot nicer to play with. You can just feed the model engine analysis and it can make as high of quality moves as needed. No longer any correlation between the model's understanding of the position and the moves that would be made but I think that's still a really nice improvement when thinking about this as adding live voice interaction to existing chess vs computer functionality rather than adding chess to possible interactions with the latest live voice model.
laweijfmvo 17d ago
agree that it’s a weird choice, but more because i don’t need my chat model to play chess at all when chess engines exist.
wongarsu 17d ago
For an LLM, just being able to play an entire game of chess without illegal moves and without inventing pieces that aren't on the board is an achievement. Even more so for a live model. Then again, who knows how much the harness helped here
time0ut 17d ago
Playing a legal game of chess without using a guided decoding technique is a massive achievement. Ref https://aclanthology.org/2025.mathnlp-main.11/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.mathnlp-main.11/.
yipinwong 17d ago
I am an adult, and i lose to elemental school kids in chess. I am not so advanced enough as a human being.

Zsfe510asG 17d ago

Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.

burky 17d ago
I can’t agree more! It feels really smooth to drive, kind of buttery compared to other frontier experiences, at least in antigravity 2.0 or whatever. I’ve been doing some web app coding with it and I’m happy with the results.
WarmWash 17d ago
For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with. I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.
- martythemaniak 17d ago
  Good news then, I don't think they're in a hurry to catch up to SOTA.
- drivebyhooting 17d ago
  Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times). Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
  - mapontosevenths 17d ago
    > Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos. Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
    - copperx 17d ago
      Yup. Reality is full of special cases.

sahaskatta 17d ago

Our company's Google Workspace Business only offers 3.6 flash & thinking in the Gemini App. Has anyone else seen 3.7 or 3.8 roll out?

cnobody 17d ago
I have access to both, benchmarks are actually better on 3.7 for my task, but happy improvement over the others.
xd1936 17d ago
I'm still only seeing 3.6 Flash / 3.6 Thinking in my Google Workspace for Education account, and 3.5 Flash-Lite / 3.6 Thinking in my "Plus" plan Gmail account.
phenomen 17d ago
3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro are included in the basic Workspace subscription. The Workspace admin has to upgrade your seat for the access to newer models ($17/mo now, $24/mo starting Jan 2027).
- sahaskatta 17d ago
  I'm the admin. I see the "AI Expanded Access" addon option in the dashboard, but it says nothing about which models it includes.
benhurmarcel 17d ago
Google takes a long time to roll out models in general. Both my personal and work accounts still have only 3.6 Flash, even though 3.8 was released 2 weeks ago and 3.7 more than a month ago.

doodlesdev 17d ago

Gemini's Live Mode is already much better than GPT Voice in my personal experience, even though it was much dumber. It really does feel like talking to a real person. ChatGPT keeps humming to whatever I say and has some weird voices. Excited to try this out! Shame on Google for not releasing Gemini 3.8 for Google AI Plus users yet, though.

ilaksh 17d ago
OpenAI just released the new full duplex mode to the API as gpt-live-1 or something like that. Very realistic.
- SyneRyder 17d ago
  Agreed. I've been using GPT-Live-1 this week, with Claude as the backend brain. It's amazing, feels like working with Jarvis. It certainly made me feel there's no point in human telephone support now - but I'm sure I'd find edge cases if that really was something I wanted to build out myself.
  - coda_ 17d ago
    Oh... Interesting! How do you have Claude as the backend brain for GPT-Live-1? I'm not very happy with live conversations with Claude, so this seems like it might be a good option.
    - SyneRyder 16d ago
      So, the way GPT-Live-1 works, the Live model just handles the conversation layer in a lightweight manner. For any deeper thinking (and I think tool calls) it will delegate to the Backend. It's like how Fable can delegate tasks to Opus while it keeps going. The Live voice can keep chatting to you while it waits for results from the Backend. The default for the Backend is a Responses Delegation that just sends it to another OpenAI hosted model. But you can set the API up to use Client Delegation instead, and have your client/harness receive the delegation request. At that point, your client can delegate it to a Claude instead, and have Claude do the deeper thinking. Unfortunately you're not actually talking to a Claude, even if it identifies as one, but you can at least talk to something informed by Claude. As for how to build that - I just had Fable build/vibe the whole thing for me. I used Go for the language, and SDL 3 to handle the audio & microphone side, even though it's just a command line app for now. I've previously been working on SDL3 bindings to Golang, and a personal AI harness with tool-calling & local MCP stdio support, so it's possible my Fable re-used some of that code. But Fable can whip something together, and the most basic tools (read,write,edit,datetime) are all really easy to add to a harness as built-in tools that you can let it call. The main downside is that Anthropic probably wants you to run it as API, so costs can blow out. And depending how you setup the harness, either every backend call is a fresh new Claude window (to which you're sending a LOT of context), of you need a way to maintain a persistent Claude conversation that you queue requests to, but at least then the context is all in one window & you can benefit from caching. But if you get it running, and play with it a bit, you'll realize this is obviously the future interface. Typing into a terminal window feels archaic. Even if we're not quite there yet, we're tantalizingly close... and anyone who has a 3D-printer & a robot arm connected via MCP/tool calls, well, this gives them Iron Man's Jarvis right now.

attels33 17d ago

When will it be available on Vertex?

water-drummer 17d ago
The real question should be when will it be available on Vertex and not be full of bugs?
SomeonesAccount 17d ago
vertex is dead, for good reason too
- bilarikan 17d ago
  Would you mind expanding on this? I thought Google changed the name to 'Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform', and altered focus to 'agent governance' workflows, but that there were no breaking changes from what was offered with Vertex AI.
  - SomeonesAccount 17d ago
    I was more saying that nobody should use it. AI Studio, while also terrible, is better and does (AFAIK) the exact same thing.
verdverm 17d ago
I've been asking the same about the open weight models, we're buying our tokens from others now, though I think those people are renting hardware from Google in the end anyway

rdtsc 17d ago

I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?

_s_a_m_ 17d ago
If Google didnt have their ad buisness theiy'd be out by now. They're like BlackBerry and Nokia at this point almost.
- jnwatson 17d ago
  And YouTube, and Cloud, and Play Store, and Waymo, not to mention that they could coast on their Anthropic and SpaceX stakes if they didn't have any of the above.
- haberdasher 17d ago
  Maps, Waymo, TPUs, YouTube, Docs, GMail, Cloud, Android, Chrome, Photos...
- nolok 17d ago
  Not sure what your comment mean in the context of parent's comment. As opposed to what, them not having it and burning money that isn't their instead like openai and anthropic? At least Google is feeding itself instead of having to create a bubble to stay alive
  - verdverm 17d ago
    Google spent most of their cash, they are now taking loans for data centers too. They recorded their first quarter of negative cash flows ever
    - nolok 17d ago
      Which is still a better position that the others? My point is you can't consider that a bad thing if you think it's ok for their competitors in the field. And if you don't and your judge them equally, then at least Google has its own cash glow and could turn the gas off at any point to go back to printing money while they have not choice.

tiahura 17d ago

Ensure transparency with SynthID watermarking All audio generated by our AI products is watermarked with SynthID. This imperceptible watermark is woven directly into the audio output, ensuring AI-generated content remains detectable to help prevent misinformation. For details on our approach to safety and responsibility, review the model card.

hajile 17d ago
It’s little to do with misinformation and much to do with trying to keep their model from collapsing from ingesting too much slop.

blovescoffee 17d ago

Great tech but the voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me

tantalor 17d ago
Which one? I like Eclipse

bronlund 17d ago

They should just give up at this point, it's just embarrassing to watch. As PrimeTime said; these are the guys that invented the 'T' in 'GPT', that deployed their first TPU in 2015, that is using billions on AI - and they are beaten by 300 people startup named Moonshot AI even. People are going to write books about this complete fumble.

fileeditview 17d ago
And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.
- tonfa 17d ago
  > they have near infinite money and others have not Given the very high margins on inference, once volume is large enough the other can also start printing enough money.
password54321 17d ago
None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at? My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.
- bronlund 17d ago
  Intelligence. They have "unlimited" resources and has researched AI since the very beginning - PageRank is a form of AI even. And still, Gemini is behind Claude, GPT, Grok, Muse, GLM, Kimi and is maybe on par with DeepSeek? As I said, it is embarrassing.
  - Forgeties79 17d ago
    > Grok 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).

glimshe 17d ago

I'm disappointed with "Extended Thinking" for 3.8 Flash. On the plus side, it's a strong general-purpose model and the cost-benefit is still compelling. However, the "Extended Thinking" should be renamed to "Slightly Extended Thinking". Considering that it's the maximum thinking option for Gemini Flash in the chat UI, it doesn't actually think a whole lot, leading to an uncomfortably high number of incorrect/poor replies.

addandsubtract 17d ago
Have you tried selecting the retry option below a reply? I think it let's you get a longer answer at least.
- glimshe 17d ago
  I used Retry plenty - but not for good reasons. Gemini fails quite a bit (error) in the app and chat interfaces.

lostmsu 17d ago

So I am building a voice assistant to control AI harnesses, and recently tried switching from GLM 5.3 Flash to Gemini 3.8 Flash because of higher tok/s and better rate limits. Before that I also used Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. Let me tell you unlike every other mentioned model Gemini 3.8 Flash trial had to be reverted the same day. Instead of simply delegating tasks it would invent additional requirements and implementation details it knew nothing about and no amount of convincing not to do it would work. That's the first time a model failed on me so spectacularly despite having practically same Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index as another model that just worked (and higher than working DS Flash). The reason I think it is relevant is: Live is likely even stupider model in every way possible (except hearing better than separate STT). So beware using it for agentic scenarios.

mvdtnz 17d ago

My Gemini app is still stuck at 3.5 Flash-lite and 3.6 Flash so I truly don't understand how Google rolls this stuff out. I don't use Gemini for anything serious so I'm not going to use the API, but it's my go-to for just searching basic information (replacing google search) because it's so darn fast.

nharada 17d ago
Yeah still on 3.6 here too, this is like the 4th or 5th model Google has announced since they last gave me access to the latest. And I pay for pro too!
- parasti 17d ago
  I'm on AI Pro and have had 3.8 since announcement day, both in the Android app and in Antigravity CLI.

samuelknight 17d ago

I have been looking for a model that's good for GUI testing. Original computer use isn't right because it's a slow screenshot loop, which doesn't capture transition and animation. Docs says this one does up to 1 FPS. That might be fast enough. If not now, we must be within a few months of high enough sample rates to do it.

TomGarden 17d ago
I find just letting a model record a video it can read frame by frame later works fine, Gemini 3.8 flash would be solid for that

smithcoin 17d ago

Did anybody watch the Primeagen's video on Google bag-fumbling? Interesting they released on the same day!

tonyhart7 17d ago
well, its because gemini is sucks at coding
melasadra 17d ago
I'm curious to know how do people in FAANG / Bay Area tech industry see influencers like Primeagen, Theo or Casey Muratori. Do they have a good read on the industry or completely out of touch? Or to put it simply, are they spouting bullshit? My concern is that some of them arent in the industry or have never been in it.

ghoshbishakh 17d ago

I love talking to chatgpt voice mode. Voice to voice AI is the only big leap that I see after the RL trained coding models.

qlte 17d ago
My issue using the voice mode is the overly expressive mimicry of natural human intonation is distracting and starts to become extremely grating after a while. There's one or two I find more understated but I would love a 2026 SOTA V2V model that speaks clearly but without the artificial personality layered on. Human interaction/theory of mind relies so much on non-verbal clues for interpreting emotion/intent and so for me having those neurons firing constantly while talking to an LLM just for an emotional no-op is exhausting to put up with for more than a couple minutes. There's one male voice that would make me assume someone was sarcastically mocking me if I was talking to an actual person because it's just so over the top.
- jiggawatts 17d ago
  One of the new Siri voice demos sounded like a lover whispering inuendo into my ear. I don’t want to be aroused by my turn-by-turn street directions, thanks.

Havoc 17d ago

Just gave it a try - very solid release. Copes well with thick accent, voices are pleasant and latency seems low. Oh and I can actually use it on a workspace account - which for most of the recent releases was an account stuck in limbo. Not personal enough for personal offering, not enterprise enough for enterprise. Well done G - will definitely be using this

Havoc 17d ago
Also appears to do well in other languages (prefer that when walking & talking in public for a bit of privacy) And looks like one can trigger live mode via siri
murkt 17d ago
Where did you try it, how can you use it? I have nothing in my Workspace (I am admin), Gemini app, AI Studio. Only 3.6 Flash

giancarlostoro 17d ago

I'm wondering if Google intends to drop the next major version of Gemini Pro as a total bombshell drop to make Anthropic and OpenAI panic. They seem to be taking their sweet time on frontier model updates.

verdverm 17d ago
They promised 3.5 Pro at their next or i/o event, but the rumor is that is never going to be released because it would have been embarrassing. They just started letting their engineers use Claude, so it sounds like things may not be going so well with Gemini
epolanski 17d ago
Why would they need to make anthropic or openai panic? Every non tech company I know is using Gemini or copilot, because the same companies already were on Google or Microsoft suite and got those as extensions. NotebookLM is way more popular in the real world than anthropic work or crap like that. In business world contracts, data retention and procurements are more important than made up benchmarks only nerds care for.

stranded22 17d ago

Google need to allow saving history and exclude it as training data. I will not use it seriously until this is resolved.

TomGarden 17d ago
Agreed. They really are the greediest when it comes to data for training (unsurprising for google I guess)

chrystianpl 17d ago

It is completely broken for me. After I ask a single question, it starts replying to itself in an infinite loop. It answers my question, then generates another reply to its own response, and keeps going. At some point, it even starts switching languages randomly.

jeffbee 17d ago
Older versions also do that.

toddmorey 17d ago

From the demo video: "Welcome to the team, we're looking forward to working with you" is sooo creepy in a synthetic AI voice. In general, try not to have agents express sentiment that really should come from a human in your company.

johnsmith1840 17d ago

3.8 is an incredible model even better is the infrs they host for it. Is this a pure TPU infra? Really high performance solid intelligence.

jeanbza 17d ago

My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now) I've been using Gemini to live chat in Afrikaans and do impromptu Afrikaans grammar lessons during my solo drives around town. It is phenomenal at speaking the language - like, it really shocks my family members when they hear it. This is probably the most joy I get from any of my usages of LLMs/AIs. It's been really, really nice getting to speak my language regularly again. =) So, I'm excited about this release and live chat getting better. I also hope the other frontier labs pick up niche languages like this as well so that I have more options.

arnorhs 17d ago
Yeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.
- trollbridge 17d ago
  Makes sense as the origin of LLMs was Google’s work on language translation.
jimmySixDOF 17d ago
for me the live mode in androids google translate app has been as close as it gets to perfect for traveling cannot believe it is a free service after trying so many others
LluisGerard 17d ago
I have a similar experience using Gemini for quick Catalan translations for iOS apps given enough context. I once asked it to summarize The Hobbit in Catalan to explain it to my daughter before sleep. I was expecting a lot of mistakes as I see regularly if I ask anything in my native language when using GPT or Claude, but it was surprisingly good. I was going just to kind of skim ahead and retell it my own way, but ended up almost saying it verbatim because it was good already. She loves Zelda so I asked it to explain the story of Breath of The Wild keeping the original names, and to make it fun, etc.. I was surprised again. I did retell some bits in my own style and taste but it is very convincing. I haven't tried Catalan on newer models like GTP-6 Astra or Fable tho. We have all these benchmarks based on software development, and AGI, etc.. but it would be cool to have some language benchmarks for different communities. As I work in english and use them in english, I wonder if using LLMs in a different language to code renders a different result as well. Like, if some of these benchmarks were made in other languages, would the result be similar.

andrewinardeer 17d ago

I've been using Gemini as a life partner. Talking to it about my feelings thoughts, plan of action and the like. It's great. I've anthropomorphized it and put the computer speaker in a doll's mouth so it seems like it's a real baby. Looking forward to where this can go.

qudat 17d ago

I’ve noticed antigravity become significantly slower over the last week or so. It’s a bummer because speed is what I care about. Qwen3.8-27b seems on par with 3.8 flash so if I don’t get speed out of a paid service I’ll just use my local model. Sad.

svcrunch 17d ago

If you'd like to experiment with Gemini 3.8 Live on a US telephone number, you can try Wokay [0]. It's an agentic memory demonstration that's built with LiveKit and Gemini. Tel: 408–897–4019 [0] https://wokay.goodmem.ai/info https://wokay.goodmem.ai/info

scottchiefbaker 17d ago

[dead]

DonsDiscountGas 17d ago

No more Gemma?

verdverm 17d ago
Big Ai is having a moment of reflection and reckoning with open weights, I wouldn't bet either way on a new Gemma release, 4 was distilled from the Gemini 3 series
aix1 17d ago
What makes you conclude that?
- DonsDiscountGas 17d ago
  Lack of releases relative to Gemini. Not that I expect them to take down the old versions, just unsure about new ones.

bengkoang 17d ago

i've been using gemini (api & pro) since last november last year. for creative writing compared to other llm, it's the best in capturing local nuance, it can even create jokes in my languages. But that just it, i cant rely on other work, hallucinate too often, the deep research are not reliable at all. Too many discussion i've had that it grasp main concept consistent but the supporting concept just plain hallucinate and not consistent. it's tested between pro & flash. This doesnt happen often on open weigh

rrr_oh_man 17d ago

I swear all day long I was thinking that there will be a new release soon because Gemini 3.1 Pro performance was in the crapper (both via API and Chat)

system2 17d ago

Still so expensive. I wish Google could compete with GLM.

laichzeit0 17d ago

Where do you see a list of which languages it supports?

farnulfo 17d ago

Now Gemini can’t make a summary of a YouTube video on his own. I need to give it the transcript.

galkk 17d ago

I don’t understand good experiences people are having with Gemini. It’s the only model that sometimes loses/forgets context in literally next message. Plus feeding unasked product links to responses.

travthedev 17d ago
Definitely true in some cases, but I find Gemini to be less biased about certain topics - which is quite nice, especially when I'm just trying to hear the facts.
solenoid0937 17d ago
I wonder how much life DeepMind has left in it, especially after Hassabis's departure. Google execs must be having discussions about simply throwing their weight behind Anthropic since they already own so much of the company.
mianos 17d ago
I agree. Lot's of people really like it. For me it often just forgets all context and starts showing random slop. It's super clear as, when I ask it what happened to some element earlier in the conversation it tells me it does not have that. It might be good if it told me, but randomly lose the plot is quite frustrating. Claude does it occasionally but it's a more a soft landing earlier context seems to be compacted, not completely lose the plot. I just cancelled my pro subscription. I really wanted it to be good but not yet.
Gareth321 17d ago
I strongly agree. I suspect it's people who have not yet used the paid models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is comparable to free models from other providers, but not in the same universe as paid models. This is frustrating because when I discuss AI with laypeople they think it's still incapable of counting the number of Rs in "strawberry." They believe it to be essentially useless and incapable of basic tasks. Which, to be fair, is the case with the free models.
- KeplerBoy 17d ago

aidio 17d ago

[flagged]

qsbuilder 17d ago

same experience here. Benchmarks don't capture the magic of having a 24/7 native-speaking conversational partner in a rare language. That alone makes these models worth it

muddi900 17d ago

Maybe now it will call my wife when I ask it to...

dainiusse 17d ago

Where is pro model, promised in io?

artdigital 17d ago

Even if really great, it still can’t use tools. The only consumer Google thing with access to MCP tools is Gemini Spark and that has lots of other problems. I wish they would combine their efforts on a great consumer product but it’s Google we’re talking about… I still dream of the day that we get full tool parity in voice and text mode so your voice assistant can do everything you connect for you. Grok and Claude are btw almost there, only a very few minor built-in tools don’t exist in voice mode, but I already use both to connect to heaps of things! It’s so valuable to verbally discuss something with an agent, have the agent pull in context from GitHub, Notion, email, and then create artifacts somewhere

yoavm 17d ago
Note sure what you mean by "tools". It does support function calling, so you can hook it to whatever tools you want. I'm using it with Home Assistant to control my smart home devices.
- artdigital 17d ago
  I mean the consumer Gemini app. It has no way to connect MCP servers to it. Only Spark can, if you switch your Gemini to the separate Spark mode

wewewedxfgdf 17d ago

I often use Gemini as a third backstop and it never fails to disappoint.

taysdafu 17d ago

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flaburgan 17d ago

Are the weights available?

mlnj 17d ago
These are not the Gemma model family you might be thinking of. Gemini models weights are never made open.

SK35 17d ago

they are working on it non stop huh, well good for us as they keep things free or cheap

Cameri 17d ago

Gemini is the most sycophantic and world-builder of all LLMs I’ve used. I’m sure all models do it but Gemini seems to have no guardrails and it will happily induce AI psychosis on you sooner or later. Just no.

Cilvic 17d ago

Did anybody find the price on this?

ha-shine 17d ago

The voices sound really pleasant and realistic. Sadly it doesn't support SIP. I found forwarding streams with websocket for phone calls tend to introduce some unwanted latency that's quite noticeable in a conversation. I've found a lot of success with GPT-live-1 so far, but the generated voices are lacking something I can't put my finger on.

mattstir 17d ago
What's your use-case for automating phone calls?

epolanski 17d ago

Just watching the video grinds my nerves for how obnoxious it is.