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Gemini 3.1 Pro

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Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#451

Post by simonw »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #378
simonw wrote: 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.

What's crazy is you've influenced them to spend real effort ensuring their model is good at generating animated svgs of animals operating vehicles. The most absurd benchmaxxing. https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF...

I like how they also did a frog on a penny-farthing and a giraffe driving a tiny car and an ostrich on roller skates and a turtle kickflipping a skateboard and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#452

Post by agentifysh »

spankalee wrote: post #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 Copi…

Relieved to read this from an ex-Googler at least we are no the crazy ones we are made out to be whenever we point out issues with Gemini

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#453

Post by mike97 »

hobofan wrote: post #251
rubslopes wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this sentiment. It may hold true for other LLM use cases (image generation, creative writing, summarizing large texts), but when it comes to coding specifically, Google is *always* behind OpenAI and Anthropic, despite having virtually infinite processing power, money, and being the ones who started this race in the first place. Until now, I've only ever used Gemini for coding tests. As long as I ha…

> despite having virtually infinite processing power, money Just because they have the money doesn't mean that they spend it excessively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized, as they are more concerned with growth at all cost, while Google is more concerned with profitability. Google has the bigger warchest and could just wait until the other two run out of money…

> OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized

So does Google, in fact I believe their antigravity limits for Opus and Sonnet for the $20 plan has higher limits than CC $20 plan, and there is no weekly cap or I couldn't get it even with heavy usage, and then you have a separate limit for Gemini cli and for other models from antigravity.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#454

Post by agentifysh »

minimaxir wrote: post #23

Price is unchanged from Gemini 3 Pro: $2/M input, $12/M output. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing Knowledge cutoff is unchanged at Jan 2025. Gemini 3.1 Pro supports "medium" thinking where Gemini 3 did not: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3 Compare to Opus 4.6's $5/M input, $25/M output. If Gemini 3.1 Pro does indeed have similar performance, the price difference is notable.

Looks like its cheaper than codex ??? this might be interesting then

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#455

Post by simonw »

simonw wrote: post #296
Arcuru wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty solid: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f5c893203621a7631ff178d9093a8...

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#456

Post by svara »

dist-epoch wrote: post #390
nikcub wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and anyone notice that the pace has broken xAI and they were just dropped behind? The frontier improvement release loop is now ant -> openai -> google

Musk said Grok 5 is currently being trained, and it has 7 trillion params (Grok 4 had 3)

My understanding is that all recent gains are from post training and no one (publicly) knows how much scaling pretraining will still help at this point.

Happy to learn more about this if anyone has more information.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#457

Post by mitkebes »

MrCheeze wrote: post #242
simonw wrote: 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.

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.

All models have improved, but from my understanding, Gemini is the main one that was specifically trained on photos/video/etc in addition to text. Other models like earlier chatgpt builds would use plugins to handle anything beyond text, such as using a plugin to convert an image into text so that chatgpt could "see" it.

Gemini was multimodal from the start, and is naturally better at doing tasks that involve pictures/videos/3d spatial logic/etc.

The newer chatgpt models are also now multimodal, which has probably helped with their svg art as well, but I think Gemini still has an edge here

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#458

Post by mikelward »

upmind wrote: post #312
1024core wrote: post #260

It 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…

The answer here is why I dislike Gemini, though it gets the correct answer, it's far too verbose.

I don't love the verbosity of any of the chatbots when I'm using my phone, but at least it put the answer/tl;dr in the first paragraph.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#459

Post by jasonjmcghee »

simonw wrote: post #451
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy is you've influenced them to spend real effort ensuring their model is good at generating animated svgs of animals operating vehicles. The most absurd benchmaxxing. https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF...

I like how they also did a frog on a penny-farthing and a giraffe driving a tiny car and an ostrich on roller skates and a turtle kickflipping a skateboard and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine.

Ok Google what are some other examples like a pelican riding a bicycle

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#460

Post by SauntSolaire »

defen wrote: post #227
sigmar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"integrating a bicycle basket, complete with a fish for the pelican... also ensuring the basket is on top of the bike, and that the fish is correctly positioned with its head up... basket is orange, with a fish inside for fun." how thoughtful of the ai to include a snack. truly a "thanks for all the fish"

A pelican already has an integrated snack-holder, though. It wouldn't need to put it in the basket.

That one's full too
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