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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 dat

by rdtsc 20d 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_ 20d 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 20d 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 20d ago
  Maps, Waymo, TPUs, YouTube, Docs, GMail, Cloud, Android, Chrome, Photos...
- nolok 20d 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 20d 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 20d 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.
    - runako 20d ago
      Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt. Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries. Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan. No, Google is not broke.
      - verdverm 19d ago
        There are a lot of accounting shenanigans going on in Big Ai, financial reports are misleading, eg Meta "building" a data center through a shell company and then renting it to themselves. It does wonders for the looks of the books Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY
    - msabalau 20d ago
      In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time. If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.
    - jasondigitized 19d ago
      Have you seen Google's balance sheet?
- chpatrick 20d ago
  They remind me of Kodak inventing the digital camera and sitting on it to preserve their film business.
WarmWash 20d ago
As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly. I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.
- mchusma 20d ago
  Yeah its good. Reasonably priced too (at current prices, if they do raise them in January I would stop recommending it). 3.7/3.8 were good releases.
  - mapontosevenths 20d ago
    To me it's a good replacement for search engines. I ask it things like 'If redshifting destroys energy ala Noether, than how can we say that time is reversible or that entropy will find an equilibrium?' and it will not only explain, but make nice interactive diagram/toys to help. A regular search engine would have taken me hours to find an answer. 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).
    - kridsdale1 19d ago
      I’ve mapped my iPhone Action Button directly in to Google App AI Mode (which is Gemini 3.8 but faster inference than the Gemini App, due to harness) It’s for this exact kind of scenario where a random question pops in to my head. Plus, it’s the most grounded by real live data of all the chatbots. Silicon Valley people are majorly sleeping on Google Search AI Mode.
  - Cilvic 19d ago
    where did you see the prices?
cmrdporcupine 20d ago
For coding models? I don't think Google is motivated to fight in that market. There's no incentive for them. Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition. Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do. Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow. Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there). I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you. Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.
- brap 20d ago
  Also: Google has like a 20% stake in Anthropic, and a very fat cloud partnership
- rdtsc 20d ago
  > Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition. Bragging rights to say they have a SOTA model. I guess that was more like Google of 10 years ago with moonshot projects. Nowadays, yeah, perhaps if it's not helping sell ads, it doesn't make sense.
  - geodel 19d ago
    Google did it AlphaGo, AlphaFold etc for bragging rights, now let frontier lab do their thing. 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
plaidfuji 20d ago
I’m wondering if they even see a coding agent as a valuable prize. It’s a competitive market in a race to the bottom economically, hard to establish consistent differentiation and virtually zero switching cost for customers. I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.
- Eridrus 19d ago
  OpenAI/Anthropic are being valued at 25/50% of Alphabet respectively in secondary markets. Maybe everybody is wrong about how valuable these companies will be, but atm it looks very dumb to not be competitive in coding.
  - dansquizsoft 19d ago
    Google is not being dumb or making some 4D strategic move by not going after coding capabilities. 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.
    - plaidfuji 19d ago
      Occam’s Razor could also simply be that OpenAI and Anthropic are massively overvalued. If OpenAI or Anthropic go away tomorrow, people find a new model and move on. If Google goes away tomorrow, people’s lives would be severely disrupted, and in the case of Gmail / Drive / auth access, even temporarily collapse.
      - dansquizsoft 18d ago
        Not sure what any of your reply here, whilst true, has to do with my original comment.
    - Eridrus 18d ago
      Oh, for sure. I think this is definitely failure to execute and not a strategic choice. Their "acquisition" of Windsurf was a clear desire to be in this market.
Keyframe 19d ago
Anecdata, but I've been using gemini personally instead of what I used regular google searches for the better part. Even in car chat/search and some lighter and not so light research (if it's not heavy on technicals). It's good enough that I use it nonstop like that. I wouldn't trust it for coding at all - switching between fable and now astra. Google in a sense won (me over) like that. I also expected them to brute force their way into everything and dominate. This is how it played out though. Image generation is great as well, but ChatGPT one is more lenient on copyright and nannying - for example when my kid asks me to "take a photo of him and Sonic". Gemini cops out either because of the kid or Sonic, disappointing us both, but ChatGPT can be.. persuaded.
- roncesvalles 19d ago
  I just use Grok for anything "controversial" like that. I actually love that different LLMs have their niches. In a typical week I might use all of Claude, Gemini, and Grok, for different kinds of asks.
smcleod 19d ago
Considering how far backwards Google has gone since the release of the 3.x models, the brain drain they've let happen, the lacklustre software ecosystem and their track record with product management ... I would say they're more likely to drop trying to compete at the frontier and try to focus on something else instead.
yoz-y 19d ago
For me 3.8 has been good enough that I don’t think I’ll be extending my Claude subscription.
yieldcrv 19d ago
I have a shared understanding for what you're asking, but semantic versioning doesn't even make sense for AI models these are essentially monthly releases, the dated releases that Deepseek and Qwen do make more sense
Gareth321 19d ago
> I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra Google has essentially give up the race for the frontier. The gap is widening very fast. Their strategy appears to be to focus on niche areas like voice, small models for on-device (see their deal with Apple), and specialised models for tasks like search, which are very inference efficient.

by rdtsc 20d ago

_s_a_m_ 20d 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 20d 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 20d ago
Maps, Waymo, TPUs, YouTube, Docs, GMail, Cloud, Android, Chrome, Photos...
nolok 20d 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 20d 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 20d 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.
  - runako 20d ago
    Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt. Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries. Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan. No, Google is not broke.
    - verdverm 19d ago
      There are a lot of accounting shenanigans going on in Big Ai, financial reports are misleading, eg Meta "building" a data center through a shell company and then renting it to themselves. It does wonders for the looks of the books Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY
  - msabalau 20d ago
    In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time. If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.
  - jasondigitized 19d ago
    Have you seen Google's balance sheet?
chpatrick 20d ago
They remind me of Kodak inventing the digital camera and sitting on it to preserve their film business.

WarmWash 20d ago

As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly. I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.

mchusma 20d ago
Yeah its good. Reasonably priced too (at current prices, if they do raise them in January I would stop recommending it). 3.7/3.8 were good releases.
- mapontosevenths 20d ago
  To me it's a good replacement for search engines. I ask it things like 'If redshifting destroys energy ala Noether, than how can we say that time is reversible or that entropy will find an equilibrium?' and it will not only explain, but make nice interactive diagram/toys to help. A regular search engine would have taken me hours to find an answer. 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).
  - kridsdale1 19d ago
    I’ve mapped my iPhone Action Button directly in to Google App AI Mode (which is Gemini 3.8 but faster inference than the Gemini App, due to harness) It’s for this exact kind of scenario where a random question pops in to my head. Plus, it’s the most grounded by real live data of all the chatbots. Silicon Valley people are majorly sleeping on Google Search AI Mode.
- Cilvic 19d ago
  where did you see the prices?

cmrdporcupine 20d ago

For coding models? I don't think Google is motivated to fight in that market. There's no incentive for them. Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition. Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do. Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow. Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there). I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you. Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.

brap 20d ago
Also: Google has like a 20% stake in Anthropic, and a very fat cloud partnership
rdtsc 20d ago
> Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition. Bragging rights to say they have a SOTA model. I guess that was more like Google of 10 years ago with moonshot projects. Nowadays, yeah, perhaps if it's not helping sell ads, it doesn't make sense.
- geodel 19d ago
  Google did it AlphaGo, AlphaFold etc for bragging rights, now let frontier lab do their thing. 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

plaidfuji 20d ago

I’m wondering if they even see a coding agent as a valuable prize. It’s a competitive market in a race to the bottom economically, hard to establish consistent differentiation and virtually zero switching cost for customers. I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.

Eridrus 19d ago
OpenAI/Anthropic are being valued at 25/50% of Alphabet respectively in secondary markets. Maybe everybody is wrong about how valuable these companies will be, but atm it looks very dumb to not be competitive in coding.
- dansquizsoft 19d ago
  Google is not being dumb or making some 4D strategic move by not going after coding capabilities. 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.
  - plaidfuji 19d ago
    Occam’s Razor could also simply be that OpenAI and Anthropic are massively overvalued. If OpenAI or Anthropic go away tomorrow, people find a new model and move on. If Google goes away tomorrow, people’s lives would be severely disrupted, and in the case of Gmail / Drive / auth access, even temporarily collapse.
    - dansquizsoft 18d ago
      Not sure what any of your reply here, whilst true, has to do with my original comment.
  - Eridrus 18d ago
    Oh, for sure. I think this is definitely failure to execute and not a strategic choice. Their "acquisition" of Windsurf was a clear desire to be in this market.

Keyframe 19d ago

Anecdata, but I've been using gemini personally instead of what I used regular google searches for the better part. Even in car chat/search and some lighter and not so light research (if it's not heavy on technicals). It's good enough that I use it nonstop like that. I wouldn't trust it for coding at all - switching between fable and now astra. Google in a sense won (me over) like that. I also expected them to brute force their way into everything and dominate. This is how it played out though. Image generation is great as well, but ChatGPT one is more lenient on copyright and nannying - for example when my kid asks me to "take a photo of him and Sonic". Gemini cops out either because of the kid or Sonic, disappointing us both, but ChatGPT can be.. persuaded.

roncesvalles 19d ago
I just use Grok for anything "controversial" like that. I actually love that different LLMs have their niches. In a typical week I might use all of Claude, Gemini, and Grok, for different kinds of asks.

smcleod 19d ago

Considering how far backwards Google has gone since the release of the 3.x models, the brain drain they've let happen, the lacklustre software ecosystem and their track record with product management ... I would say they're more likely to drop trying to compete at the frontier and try to focus on something else instead.

yoz-y 19d ago

For me 3.8 has been good enough that I don’t think I’ll be extending my Claude subscription.

yieldcrv 19d ago

I have a shared understanding for what you're asking, but semantic versioning doesn't even make sense for AI models these are essentially monthly releases, the dated releases that Deepseek and Qwen do make more sense

Gareth321 19d ago

> I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra Google has essentially give up the race for the frontier. The gap is widening very fast. Their strategy appears to be to focus on niche areas like voice, small models for on-device (see their deal with Apple), and specialised models for tasks like search, which are very inference efficient.