Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 3.1 Pro

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 951 posts

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#591

Post by metadat »

alphabetting wrote: post #393
karmasimida wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini just doesn’t do even mildly well in agentic stuff and I don’t know why. OpenAI has mostly caught up with Claude in agentic stuff, but Google needs to be there and be there quickly

the agentic benchmarks for 3.1 indicate Gemini has caught up. the gains are big from 3.0 to 3.1. For example the APEX-Agents benchmark for long time horizon investment banking, consulting and legal work: 1. Gemini 3.1 Pro - 33.2% 2. Opus 4.6 - 29.8% 3. GPT 5.2 Codex - 27.6% 4. Gemini Flash 3.0 - 24.0% 5. GPT 5.2 - 23.0% 6. Gemini 3.0 Pro - 18.0%

Ranking Codex 5.2 ahead of plain 5.2 doesn't make sense. Codex is expressly designed for coding tasks. Not systems design, not problem analysis, and definitely not banking, but actually solving specific programming tasks (and it's very, very good at this). GPT 5.2 (non-codex) is better in every other way.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#593

Post by fastball »

sdeiley wrote: post #548

People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF. Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight ____ Update: 3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed. https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...

We are not at the moment where price matters. All that matters is performance.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#594

Post by sigmoid10 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #580

If it’s any consolation, it was able to one-shot a UI & data sync race condition that even Opus 4.6 struggled to fix (across 3 attempts). So far I like how it’s less verbose than its predecessor. Seems to get to the point quicker too. While it gives me hope, I am going to play it by the ear. Otherwise it’s going to be - Gemini for world knowledge/general intelligence/R&D and Opus/Sonnet 4.6 to finish it off. UPDATE:…

For me it's Opus 4.6 for researching code/digging through repos, gpt 5.3 codex for writing code, gemini for single hardcore science/math algorithms and grok for things the others refuse to answer or skirt around (e.g. some security/exploitability related queries). Get yourself one of those wrappers that support all models and forget thinking about who has the best model. The question is who has the best model for your problem. And there's usually a correct answer, even if it changes regularly.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#595

Post by Yizahi »

embedding-shape wrote: post #73
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.

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…

Asking LLM programs to "not do the thing" often results in them tripping and generating output including that "thing", since those are simply the tokens which will enter the input. I always try to rephrase query the way that all my instructions have only "positive" forms - "do only this" or "do it only in that way" or "do it only for those parameters requested" etc. Can't say if that helps much, but it is possible.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#596

Post by paganel »

surgical_fire wrote: post #146
Robdel12 wrote: post #86

I really want to use google’s models but they have the classic Google product problem that we all like to complain about. I am legit scared to login and use Gemini CLI because the last time I thought I was using my “free” account allowance via Google workspace. Ended up spending $10 before realizing it was API billing and the UI was so hard to figure out I gave up. I’m sure I can spend 20-40 more mins to sort this ou…

May be very silly of me, but I avoid using Gemini on my personal Google account. I use it at work, because my employer provides it. I am scared some automated system may just decide I am doing something bad and terminate my account. I have been moving important things to Proton, but there are some stuff that I couldn't change that would cause me a lot of annoyance. It's not trivial to set up an alternative account ju…

Same feeling here, if it makes you feel any better (for sure it made me better seeing I'm not alone in this).

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#597

Post by cmrdporcupine »

menaerus wrote: post #527
stephen_cagle wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know…

I don't know ... as of now I am literally instructing it to solve the chained expression computation problem which incurs a lot of temporary variables, of which some can be elided by the compiler and some cannot. Think linear algebra expressions which yield a lot of intermediate computations for which you don't want to create a temporary. This is production code and not an easy problem. And yet it happily told me wha…

People's objections are not the quality of code or analysis that Gemini produces. It's that it's inept at doing things like editing pieces of files or running various tools.

As an ex-Googler part of me wonders if this has to do with the very ... bespoke ... nature of the developer tooling inside Google. Though it would be crazy for them to be training on that.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#598

Post by bluegatty »

sdeiley wrote: post #548

People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF. Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight ____ Update: 3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed. https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...

You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.

So a lot of these things are relative.

Now if that equation plays out 20K times a day, well that's one thing, but if it's 'once a day' then the cost basis becomes irrelevant. Like the cost of staplers for the Medical Device company.

Obviously it will matter, but for development ... it's probably worth it to pay $300/mo for the best model, when the second best is $0.

For consumer AI, the math will be different ... and that will be a big deal in the long run.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#600

Post by sdeiley »

Svoka wrote: post #559
sdeiley wrote: post #548

People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF. Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight ____ Update: 3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed. https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...

While price is definitely important, results are extremely important. Gemini often falls into the 'didn't do' it part of the spectrum, this days Opus almost always does 'good enough'. Gemini definitely has its merits but for me it just doesn't do what other models can. I vibe-coded an app which recommends me restaurants. The app uses gemini API to make restaurants given bunch of data and prompt. App itself is vibe-co…

The binary you draw on models that havent been out a quarter is borderline insane.

Opus is absurdly good in Claude code but theres a lot of use cases Gemini is great at.

I think Google is further behind with the harness than the model

Post reply on HN