No matter how good the new Gemini models have become, my bad experience with early Gemini is still stuck with me and I am afraid I still suffer from confirmation bias. Whenever I just look at the Gemini app, I already assume it’s going to be a bad experience.
Gemini 2.5 Flash
251–260 of 582 posts
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#252Google making Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) free was a big deal. I haven't tried the more expensive OpenAI models so I can't even compare, only to the free models I have used of theirs in the past. Gemini 2.5 Pro is so much of a step up (IME) that I've become sold on Google's models in general. It not only is smarter than me on most of the subjects I engage with it, it also isn't completely obsequious. The model push…
>obsequious Thanks for the new word, I have to look it up. "obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree" Apparently it means an AI that mindlessly follow your logic and instructions without reasoning and articulation is not good enough.
It's a bit of a fancy way to say "yes man". Like in corporations or politics, if a leader surrounds themselves with "yes men".
A synonym would be sycophantic which would be "behaving or done in an obsequious way in order to gain advantage." The connotation is the other party misrepresents their own opinion in order to gain favor or avoid disapproval from someone of a higher status. Like when a subordinate tries to guess what their superior wants to hear instead of providing an unbiased response.
I think that accurately describes my experience with some LLMs due to heavy handed RLHF towards agreeableness.
In fact, I think obsequious is a better word since it doesn't have the cynical connotation of sycophant. LLMs don't have a motive and obsequious describes the behavior without specifying the intent.
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#253Google making Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) free was a big deal. I haven't tried the more expensive OpenAI models so I can't even compare, only to the free models I have used of theirs in the past. Gemini 2.5 Pro is so much of a step up (IME) that I've become sold on Google's models in general. It not only is smarter than me on most of the subjects I engage with it, it also isn't completely obsequious. The model push…
After comparing Gemini Pro and Claude Sonnet 3.7 coding answers side by side a few times, I decided to cancel my Anthropic subscription and just stick to Gemini.
Yes, IME, Anthropic seemed to be ahead of Google by a decent amount with Sonnet 3.5 vs 1.5 Pro.
However, Sonnet 3.7 seemed like a very small increase, whereas 2.5 Pro seemed like quite a leap.
Now, IME, Google seems to be comfortably ahead.
2.5 Pro is a little slow, though.
I'm not sure which model Google uses for the AI answers on search, but I find myself using Search for a lot of things I might ask Gemini (via 2.5 Pro) if it was as fast as Search's AI answers.
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#254Google making Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) free was a big deal. I haven't tried the more expensive OpenAI models so I can't even compare, only to the free models I have used of theirs in the past. Gemini 2.5 Pro is so much of a step up (IME) that I've become sold on Google's models in general. It not only is smarter than me on most of the subjects I engage with it, it also isn't completely obsequious. The model push…
>obsequious Thanks for the new word, I have to look it up. "obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree" Apparently it means an AI that mindlessly follow your logic and instructions without reasoning and articulation is not good enough.
Another useful word in this context is “sycophancy,” meaning excessive flattery or insincere agreement. Amanda Askell of Anthropic has used it to describe a trait they try to suppress in Claude:
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#255More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more g…
> The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions.
OpenAI has already succeeded.
If it ends up being a $100B company instead of a $10T company, that is success. By a very large margin.
It's hard to imagine a world in which OpenAI just goes bankrupt and ends up being worth nothing.
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#256At this point, at the current pace of AI model development, I feel like I can't tell which one is better. I usually end up using multiple LLMs to get a task done to my taste. They're all equally good and bad. It's like using GCP vs AWS vs Azure all over again, except in the AI space.
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Gemini almost exclusively as a normal user. What am I missing out on that they are far behind on? It seems shockingly good and I've watched it get much better up to 2.5 Pro.
Mostly brand recognition and the earlier Geminis had more refusals. As a consumer, I also really miss the Advanced voice mode of ChatGPT, which is the most transformative tech in my daily life. It's the only frontier model with true audio-to-audio.
What is true audio-to-audio in this case?
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#258More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more g…
> The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions. OpenAI has already succeeded. If it ends up being a $100B company instead of a $10T company, that is success. By a very large margin. It's hard to imagine a world in which OpenAI just goes bankrupt and ends up being worth nothing.
it goes bankrupt when the cost of running the business outweights the earnings in the long run
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it will add INSANE amounts of "robust error handling" to quick scripts where I can be confident about assumptions. This turns my clean 40 lines of Python where I KNOW the JSONL I am parsing is valid into 200+ lines filled with ten new try except statements. Even when I tell it not to do this, it loves to "find and help" in other ways. Quite annoying. But overall it is pretty dang good. It even spotted a bug I mi…
I didn't realize this was a bigger trend, I asked it to write a simple testing script that POSTed a string to a local HTTP server as JSON, and it wrote a 40 line script, handling any possible error. I just wanted two lines.
Yes, as late as earlier today, I asked it to provide "naive" code which helped a bit.
Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of text in books is surprisingly finite. My best estimate was that there are ~10¹³ tokens available in all books ( https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data ), which is less than frontier models are already being trained on. On the other hand, book tokens are probably much "better" than random internet tokens. Wikipedia for example seems to get much higher weight than other sources, and it's only ~3×10¹⁰…
We need more books! On it…
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