Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

blog.google

181–190 of 512 posts

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#181

It is interesting to see that they keep focusing on the cheapest model instead of the frontier model. Probably because of their primary (internal?) customer's need?

It's cheaper and faster to train a small model, which is better for a research team to iterate on, right? If Google decides that a particular small model is really good, why wouldn't they go ahead and release it while they work on scaling up that work to train the larger versions of the model?

I have no knowledge of Google specific cases, but in many teams smaller models are trained upon bigger frontier models through distillation. So the frontier models come first then smaller models later.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#182
post #16

Am I alone in thinking the word “agentic” is dumb as shit? Most of these things seem to just be a system prompt and a tool that get invoked as part of a pipeline. They’re hardly “agents”. They’re modules.

Definitely not alone. With all the this money at stake, coining dumb terms like this might make you a pretty penny.

It's like a meme that can be milked for monetization.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#183
Buried in the announcement is the real gem — they’re releasing a new SDK that actually looks like it follows modern best practices. Could be a game-changer for usability.

They’ve had OpenAI-compatible endpoints for a while, but it’s never been clear how serious they were about supporting them long-term. Nice to see another option showing up. For reference, their main repo (not kidding) recommends setting up a Kubernetes cluster and a GCP bucket to submit batch requests.

[1]https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper and faster to train a small model, which is better for a research team to iterate on, right? If Google decides that a particular small model is really good, why wouldn't they go ahead and release it while they work on scaling up that work to train the larger versions of the model?

I have no knowledge of Google specific cases, but in many teams smaller models are trained upon bigger frontier models through distillation. So the frontier models come first then smaller models later.

Training a "frontier model" without testing the architecture is very risky.

Meta trained the smaller Llama 3 models first, and then trained the 405B model on the same architecture once it had been validated on the smaller ones. Later, they went back and used that 405B model to improve the smaller models for the Llama 3.1 release. Mistral started with a number of small models before scaling up to larger models.

I feel like this is a fairly common pattern.

If Google had a bigger version of Gemini 2.0 ready to go, I feel confident they would have mentioned it, and it would be difficult to distill it down to a small model if it wasn't ready to go.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#185

Big companies can be slow to pivot, and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. But, once they do get moving in the right direction the can achieve things that smaller companies can't. Google has an insane amount of talent in this space, and seems to be getting the right results from that now. Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market, but hard…

So far, for my tests, it has performed terribly compared to ChatGPT and Claude. I hope this version is better.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#186

Beats Gemini 1.5 Pro at all but two of the listed benchmarks. Google DeepMind is starting to get their bearings in the LLM era. These are the minds behind AlphaGo/Zero/Fold. They control their own hardware destiny with TPUs. Bullish.

If you look at where talent is going, it's Anthropic that is the real competitor to Google, not OpenAI.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#187
post #16

Am I alone in thinking the word “agentic” is dumb as shit? Most of these things seem to just be a system prompt and a tool that get invoked as part of a pipeline. They’re hardly “agents”. They’re modules.

The beauty of LLMs isn’t just these coding objects speak human vernacular but they can be concatenated with human vernacular prompts and that itself can be used as an input, command or output sensibly without necessarily causing error even if a series of inputs combinations weren't preprogrammed.

I have an A.I. textbook that has agent terminology that was written preLLm days. agents are just autonomous ish code that loops on itself with some extra functionality. LLMs in their elegance can more easily out the box selfloop just on the basis concatenating language prompts, sensibly. They are almost agent ready out the box by this very elegant quality(the textbook agentic diagram is just a conceptual self perpetuation loop), except…

Except they fail at a lot or get stuck at hiccups. But, here is a novel thought. What if an LLM becomes more agentic (ie more able to sustain autonomous chain prompts that do actions without a terminal failure) and less copilotee not by more complex controlling wrapper self perpetuation code, but by means of training the core llm itself to more fluidly function in agentic scenarios.

a better agentically performing llm that isnt mislabeled with a bad buzzword might not reveal itself in its wrapper control code but through it just performing better in an typical agentic loop or environment conditions with whatever initiating prompt, control wrapper code, or pipeline that initiates its self perpetuation cycle.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#188

What's everyone's favorite LLM leaderboard? Gemini 2 seems to be edging out 4o on chatbot arena( https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard )

I like that https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models describes both quality and speed (tokens/s and first chunk s). Not sure how accurate it is; anyone know? Speed and variance of it in particular seems difficult to pin down because providers obviously vary it with load to control their costs.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#189

> We're also launching a new feature called Deep Research, which uses advanced reasoning and long context capabilities to act as a research assistant, exploring complex topics and compiling reports on your behalf. It's available in Gemini Advanced today. Anyone seeing this? I don't have an option in my dropdown.

Not seeing it yet on web or mobile (in Canada)

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#190
I've been using gemini-exp-1206 and I notice a lot of similarities to the new gemini-2.0-flash-exp: they're not that much actually smarter but they go out of their way to convince you they are with overly verbose "reasoning" and explanations. The reasoning and explanations aren't necessarily wrong per se, but put them aside and focus on the actual logical reasoning steps and conclusions to your prompts and it's still very much a dumb model.

The models do just fine on "work" but are terrible for "thinking". The verbosity of the explanations (and the sheer amount of praise the models like to give the prompter - I've never had my rear end kissed so much!) should lead one to beware any subjective reviews of their performance rather than objective reviews focusing solely on correct/incorrect.

Post reply on HN