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Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

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Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#93
post #24

Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation. Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?

They're main edge has been multimodal. I think they're still the best overall on multimodal? If I were them I would try to be the best at at least something.

I never personally got the least bit excited about Sora or nanobanana or whatever video/audio generation thing. But I guess I'm just not their customer. I do love the read-side of it though.

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#94
post #24

Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation. Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?

YouTube. And video ads. Previously when making video ads you'd need to actually create the video. Actors, cameramen, editors - you name it. Now a new video ads is just a prompt away, directly inside the ad-spend web UI too no doubt. People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic, but I am not so sure...

Google owns 15% of Anthropic, Claude trains and runs on TPUs, and Google cloud is backlogged with demand from both OAI and Anthropic.

Google is selling shovels, leasing mines, buy stakes in "competitors" and doing it's own exploration/mining. When you look at the full picture, it kinda doesn't even look like Gemini matters that much to them overall.

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#95
post #2

I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.

It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and a few distinct narrators: * https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png * https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png * https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png

This is very interesting! Imagine Silly Tavern, with dialog tagging and coloring of some sort, auto-generated talking heads. Almost a game engine.

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models. The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening. I think it's reasonable to not completely drain o…

Google paid for 3.5 Pro training. They just didn't release it. They never gave an official answer as to why, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions. They did not decide it wasn't worth spending the money to train. They absolutely spent the money.

3.5 was almost certainly a 3.1 post-train, so likely a small investment on Google's part.

They mentioned that they have already started pretraining Gemini 4, which will be the full ground up rip-your-face-off-expensive training that is often discussed.

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#97
post #4
post #2

I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.

Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points. For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau... Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.

I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops.

e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#98
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low. I've been following this for a long time. They were leaving Firefox out when its usage wasn't low. Probably the typical backdoor executive mandate that led to death by "sprint prioritization": Yes, we will for sure work on the Firefox compatibility bug, Dave-Open-Source-Enthusiast-Google-Dev. But we can only pick up 10 bugfixing tickets this sprint and the ticke…

I heard that Firefox is banned internally at Google (something-something-security) so Devs can't even test against firefox

Not true -- at least up to 2018 when I worked there.

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#99
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that Firefox is banned internally at Google (something-something-security) so Devs can't even test against firefox

Not true -- at least up to 2018 when I worked there.

What I heard was more recent than 8 years ago, more like 6-12 months ago

Re: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google paid for 3.5 Pro training. They just didn't release it. They never gave an official answer as to why, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions. They did not decide it wasn't worth spending the money to train. They absolutely spent the money.

I work there. I have zero internal knowledge about the model. Opinion my own, etc. I don't think it is worth fighting to win on a month to month time horizon. When you step back and look an inch above this market, Gemini Pro 3.1 as a product was released in February. 6 months. It feels like forever and that Google is behind, but on a 2-3 year horizon? The models are going to stay similar. Also, look at Flash 3.5 to 3…

I'm the CTO of a GCP shop with an 8 figure annual commit.

If you'd told me at the end of Cloud Next 2025 that by now Google still wouldn't have a competitive offering to agentic coding offerings from Anthropic (Claude Code + Fable) or OpenAI (Codex + Sol), I wouldn't have believed you.

In our non-coding use cases where we're embedding models in our product, we're also not reaching for GCP stuff. Because Anthropic has the mindshare of our engineers and product folks, since it's what they use every day.

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