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Gemini 3.1 Pro

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191–200 of 951 posts

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#191
post #60

I hereby allow you to release models not at the same time as your competitors.

It is super interesting that this is the same thing that happened in November (ie all labs shipping around the same week 11/12-11/23).

They're just throwing a big Chinese New Year celebration.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#192

I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini. Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious

I use gemini for everything because I trust google to keep the data I send them safe, because they know how to run prod at scale, and they are more environmentally friendly than everyone else (tpu,us-central1).

This includes my custom agent / copilot / cowork (which uses vertex ai and all models therein). This is where I do more searching now (with genAi grounding) I'm about to work on several micro projects that will hold Ai a little differently.

All that being said, google Ai products suck hard. I hate using every one of them. This is more a reflection on the continued degradation of PM/Design at Big G, from before Ai, but accellationally worse since. I support removing Logan from the head of this shit show

disclaimer: long time g-stan, not so stan any more

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#193
post #16
post #10

Gemini 3 seems to have a much smaller token output limit than 2.5. I used to use Gemini to restructure essays into an LLM-style format to improve readability, but the Gemini 3 release was a huge step back for that particular use case. Even when the model is explicitly instructed to pause due to insufficient tokens rather than generating an incomplete response, it still truncates the source text too aggressively, losi…

> Even when the model is explicitly instructed to pause due to insufficient tokens Is there actually a chance it has the introspection to do anything with this request?

No.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#194
post #52

Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.

Ugh, the gears and chain don't mesh and there's no sprocket on the rear hub But seriously, I can't believe LLMs are able to one-shot a pelican on a bicycle this well. I wouldn't have guessed this was going to emerge as a capability from LLMs 6 years ago. I see why it does now, but... It still amazes me that they're so good at some things.

next time you host a party, have people try to draw a bicycle on your whiteboard (you have a whiteboard in your house right? you should, anyway...)

human adults are generally quite bad at drawing them, unless they spend a lot of time actually thinking about bicycles as objects

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#196
post #52

Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.

Less pretty and more practical, it's really good at outputting circuit designs as SVG schematics. https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/dEdbH8Sw

I don't know what of this is the prompt and what was the output, but that's a pretty bad schematic (for both aesthetic and circuit-design reasons).

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#197

I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini. Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious

I feel like Gemini 3 was incredible on non-software/coding research. I have learned so much systems biology the last two months it blows my mind.

I had only started using Opus 4.6 this week. Sonnet it seems like is much better at having a long conversation with. Gemini is good for knowledge retrieval but I think Opus 4.6 has caught up. The biggest thing that made Gemini worth it for me the last 3 months is I crushed it with questions. I wouldn't have even got 10% of the Opus use that I got from Gemini before being made to slow down.

I have a deep research going right now on 3.1 for the first time and I honestly have no idea how I am going to tell if it is better than 3.

It seems like agentic coding Gemini wasn't as good but just asking it to write a function, I think it only didn't one shot what I asked it twice. Then fixed the problem on the next prompt.

I haven't logged in to bother with chatGPT in about 3 months now.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more. Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do…

> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors Just asking "Explain what this service does?" turns into [No response for three minutes...] +729 -522

it's also so aggressive about taking out debug log statements and in-progress code. I'll ask it to fill in a new function somewhere else and it will remove all of the half written code from the piece I'm currently working on.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#199
I hope this works better than 3.0 Pro

I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development.

It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus.

Within VS Code Copilot Claude will have a good mix of thinking streams and responses to the user. Gemini will almost completely use thinking tokens, and then just do something but not tell you what it did. If you don't look at the thinking tokens you can't tell what happened, but the thinking token stream is crap. It's all "I'm now completely immersed in the problem...". Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress. It's bad at using tools and tries to edit files in weird ways instead of using the provided text editing tools. In Copilot it, won't stop and ask clarifying questions, though in Gemini CLI it will.

So I've tried to adopt a plan-in-Gemini, execute-in-Claude approach, but while I'm doing that I might as well just stay in Claude. The experience is just so much better.

For as much as I hear Google's pulling ahead, Anthropic seems to be to me, from a practical POV. I hope Googlers on Gemini are actually trying these things out in real projects, not just one-shotting a game and calling it a win.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#200

Implementation and Sustainability Hardware: Gemini 3 Pro was trained using Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are specically designed to handle the massive computations involved in training LLMs and can speed up training considerably compared to CPUs. TPUs often come with large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, allowing for the handling of large models and batch sizes during training, which can lead to bet…

Another reason to use Gemini then.

Less impact on gamers…

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