The visual capabilities of this model are frankly kind of ridicioulus what the hell.
Gemini 3.1 Pro
291–300 of 951 posts
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#292I 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 Copi…
Is the thinking token stream obfuscated? Im fully immersed
It's just a summary generated by a really tiny model. I guess it also an ad-hoc way to obfuscate it, yes. In particular they're hiding prompt injections they're dynamically adding sometimes. Actual CoT is hidden and entirely different from that summary. It's not very useful for you as a user, though (neither is the summary).
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#293Pretty 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.
Does anyone understand why LLMs have gotten so good at this? Their ability to generate accurate SVG shapes seems to greatly outshine what I would expect, given their mediocre spatial understanding in other contexts.
My best guess is that the labs put a lot of work into HTML and CSS spatial stuff because web frontend is such an important application of the models, and those improvements leaked through to SVG as well.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just gave it a shot and this is what I got: https://codepen.io/takoid/pen/wBWLOKj The model thought for over 5 minutes to produce this. It's not quite photorealistic (some parts are definitely "off"), but this is definitely a significant leap in complexity.
Good to see it wearing a helmet. Their safety team must be on their game.
Yes but why would a pelican need a helmet? If it falls over it can just fly away...
Common sense 1
Gemini 0
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#295Fine, I guess. The only commercial API I use to any great extent is gemini-3-flash-preview: cheap, fast, great for tool use and with agentic libraries. The 3.1-pro-preview is great, I suppose, for people who need it. Off topic, but I like to run small models on my own hardware, and some small models are now very good for tool use and with agentic libraries - it just takes a little more work to get good results.
Seconded. Gemini used to be trash and I used Claude and Codex a lot but gemini-3-flash-preview punches above it's weight, it's decent and I rarely if ever run into any token limit either.
Thirded, I've been using gemini-3-flash to great effect. Anytime I have something more complicated, I give it to pro & flash to see what happens. Coin flip if flash is nearly equivalent (too many moving vars to be analytical at this point)
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#296Pretty 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.
Did you stop using the more detailed prompt? I think you described it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/
It seems to be having capacity problems right now but I'll run that as soon as I can get it to work.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#297It got the car wash question perfectly: You are definitely going to have to drive it there—unless you want to put it in neutral and push! While 200 feet is a very short and easy walk, if you walk over there without your car, you won't have anything to wash once you arrive. The car needs to make the trip with you so it can get the soap and water. Since it's basically right next door, it'll be the shortest drive of you…
They probably had time to toss that example in the training soup.
Previous models from competitors usually got that correct, and the reasoning versions almost always did.
This kind of reflexive criticism isn't helpful, it's closer to a fully generalized counter-argument against LLM progress, whereas it's obvious to anyone that models today can do things they couldn't do six months ago, let alone 2 years back.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#2983.1 Pro is the first model to correctly count the number of legs on my "five legged dog" test image. 3.0 flash was the previous best, getting it after a few prompts of poking. 3.1 got it on the first prompt though, with the prompt being "How many legs does the dog have? Count Carefully". However, it didn't get it on the first try with the original prompt (prompt: "How many legs does the dog have?"). It initially said…
your question may have become part of the training data with how much coverage there was around it. perhaps you should devise a new test :P
Honestly at this point I have fed this image in so many times on so many models, that it also functions as a test for "Are they training on my image specifically" (they are generally, for sure, but that's along with everything else in the ocean of info people dump in).
I genuinely don't think they are. GPT-5.2 still stands by 4 legs, and OAI has been getting this image consistently for over a year. And 3.1 still fumbled with the harder prompt "How many legs does the dog have?". I needed to add the "count carefully" part to tip it off that something was amiss.
Since it did well I'll make some other "extremely far out of the norm" images to see how it fairs. A spider with 10 legs or a fish with two side fins.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#299Earlier 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
What. You don't have yours ask for edit approval?
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is this capability “emergent”, or do AI firms specifically target SVG generation in order to improve it? How would we be able to tell?
Google specifically boast about their SVG performance in the announcement post: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
You can try any combination of animal on vehicle to confirm that they likely didn't target pelicans directly though.