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Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

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Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#51

Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.

For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with. I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.

Agreed. My impression is that the more verbose output of sol, astra etc is that it helps it steer itself on long running tasks (but is worse for the human user to read)

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with. I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.

Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times). Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.

> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.

Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#53

Not a great impression to have your demo video demonstrate how one of your 'most advanced' AI models loses to the most common check-mate pattern in all of chess.

agree that it’s a weird choice, but more because i don’t need my chat model to play chess at all when chess engines exist.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#54

Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.

It's also the only model that generates accurate translation and localization. No other frontier model comes close. Although Gemini's coding capabilities are subpar, its natural language processing is top-tier.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#55

Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.

We have an agentic system that produces insights for end users, and runs most of its work on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash but as an output stage transforms the resulting text through Gemini 3.8 Flash for readability, and it works.

On my TODO is try and run all of the analysis pipeline in dense "machine speak" to save on tokens and just let Gemini sort it out at the end.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#56
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly. I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash r…

Yeah its good. Reasonably priced too (at current prices, if they do raise them in January I would stop recommending it). 3.7/3.8 were good releases.

To me it's a good replacement for search engines. I ask it things like 'If redshifting destroys energy ala Noether, than how can we say that time is reversible or that entropy will find an equilibrium?' and it will not only explain, but make nice interactive diagram/toys to help. A regular search engine would have taken me hours to find an answer.

However, if I want it to DO something then Gemini is in absolute last place. I don't trust it for anything more than renaming files that I don't care about very much or extracting data (though it's too expensive for data extraction at scale).

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#57
post #41

Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.

Wondering if people have managed to have Gemini in-front of other models like claude/codex models and only interact with that. Having Gemini act as a pure human/llm translator.

Not in the principled sense you mean but I have in fact recently started having Gemini explain to me what Claude is talking to me about, lol.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#58
post #26

My Gemini app is still stuck at 3.5 Flash-lite and 3.6 Flash so I truly don't understand how Google rolls this stuff out. I don't use Gemini for anything serious so I'm not going to use the API, but it's my go-to for just searching basic information (replacing google search) because it's so darn fast.

Yeah still on 3.6 here too, this is like the 4th or 5th model Google has announced since they last gave me access to the latest. And I pay for pro too!
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