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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

#81

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

In my experience, with minimum prompting, deepseek also generates very decent text.

Not at all in mine. Deepseek has some of the worst prose of the close to frontier models in my opinion.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#83

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.

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)

Yes, when post training models for long tasks this happens gradually. It is not easy to prevent it as such.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#84

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.

Yea. I have asked it to verify my ideas with experiments sometimes. And it cheats and warps the results so that the results are reached

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#85

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

I was surprised when (finally) trying out Claude how much I preferred Gemini's way of communicating. I wont argue Claude is better at coding, but for knowledge work, I had to dig through Claude output to find what I actually wanted. At times, it even felt borderline incomprehensible.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#86

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.

“caveats and provisos” makes me think of Robin Williams’ genie imitating William F. Buckley Jr.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#88
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your comment mean in the context of parent's comment. As opposed to what, them not having it and burning money that isn't their instead like openai and anthropic? At least Google is feeding itself instead of having to create a bubble to stay alive

Google spent most of their cash, they are now taking loans for data centers too. They recorded their first quarter of negative cash flows ever

In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.

If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#89

I love talking to chatgpt voice mode. Voice to voice AI is the only big leap that I see after the RL trained coding models.

My issue using the voice mode is the overly expressive mimicry of natural human intonation is distracting and starts to become extremely grating after a while.

There's one or two I find more understated but I would love a 2026 SOTA V2V model that speaks clearly but without the artificial personality layered on.

Human interaction/theory of mind relies so much on non-verbal clues for interpreting emotion/intent and so for me having those neurons firing constantly while talking to an LLM just for an emotional no-op is exhausting to put up with for more than a couple minutes.

There's one male voice that would make me assume someone was sarcastically mocking me if I was talking to an actual person because it's just so over the top.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

#90

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.

For rabbit holes, how do you get Gemini to do any research before answering? I've very recently had it hallucinate on me like it's 2023, and that was on Pro/Thinking, as far as I remember.
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