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.
I found that it's shockingly good with R. (the only language I know and can correct for)
I doubt they even intended it to be, but it seems like I kept going from resorting to 3.5-3.8 (over time) to realizing that Claude and GPT, while great at Python, will make rudimentary mistakes with R; even when they compose giant complicated R code.
> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos. Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
This is commonly why, on Reddit in particular, you can get eaten alive. Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident. Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writin…
I consider, on the contrary, caveating and hedging annoying 'typical redditor'/internet behaviors: they care more about being "technically correct" than conveying the message. On the internet, if you make even the tiniest mistake or simplification, someone will criticize you, so you're trained to always hedge. In normal discussions with friends you can just make general statements and people get what you mean.
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.
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.
"couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos."
When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.
My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now) I've been using Gemini to live chat in Afrikaans and do impromptu Afrikaans grammar lessons during my solo drives around town. It is phenomenal at speaking the language - like, it really shocks my family members when they hear it. This is probably the most joy I g…
Yeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
Chatgpt doesn’t seem so bad lately. At least as a Claude refugee.
Yeah, I set it to “warm: less”, “enthusiastic: less” and “emoji: less” and it was much more bearable than I remembered it being before. Although it does love to “separate” questions when it thinks.
I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?
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…
Not only that, the output of tps is high. So not only can it handle most mid-level tasks perfectly fine, but can do it with speed!
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.
That might depend on whether you are translating fiction or nonfiction.
Anecdotally I'd rate Gemini behind Claude and OpenAI models at fiction and I can't find any benchmarks showing Gemini is the clear winner at this task.
I’ve noticed antigravity become significantly slower over the last week or so. It’s a bummer because speed is what I care about. Qwen3.8-27b seems on par with 3.8 flash so if I don’t get speed out of a paid service I’ll just use my local model. Sad.