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Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#231

I started doing some experimentation with this new Deep Think agent, and after five prompts I reached my daily usage limit. For $250 USD/mo that’s what you’ll be getting folks. It’s just bizarrely uncompetitive with o3-pro and Grok 4 Heavy. Anecdotally (from my experience) this was the one feature that enthusiasts in the AI community were interested in to justify the exorbitant price of Google’s Ultra subscription. I…

I'm not in the AI sceptic camp (LLMs can be useful for some tasks, and I use them often), but this is the big issue at the moment.

In order for agentic AI to replace (for example) a software engineer, we need a big step up in capability, around an order of magnitude. These chain of thought models do get a bit closer to that, although in my opinion we're still a way away.

However, at the same time we need about an order of magnitude decrease in price. These models are expensive even at the current price tokens are sold at which seems to be below the actual cost. And these massive CoT models are taking us in completely the wrong direction in terms of cost

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the general “discovery” is that using the same reasoning compute effort, but spreading them over multiple different agents generally leads to better results. It solves the “longer thinking leads to worse results” problem by approaching multiple paths of thinking in parallel, but just not think as long.

> Yeah the general “discovery” is that using the same reasoning compute effort, but spreading them over multiple different agents generally leads to better results. Isn’t the compute effort N times as expensive, where N is the number of agents? Unless you meant in terms of time (and even then, I guess it’d be the slowest of the N agents).

The idea is that instead of assigning 10,000 thinking tokens to one chain of thought, assigning 1,000 thinking tokens to 10 chains of thought and composing those independent outputs into a single output yields better results.

The fact that it can be done in parallel is just a bonus.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#233
post #171

They missed an oppportunity to name it Deep Thought.

would have made possible a class of jokes: - i wonder how many iterations we need with it before succeeding - i ran it 5 minutes and the deep thought model started to hallucinate, i hope not because oxygen deprivation ...

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the analogy hold?

Hardware typically gets faster and cheaper over time. Unless we hit hard a wall because of physics then I don't see any reason that won't continue to be true.

The factories to make the better chips are themselves increasingly expensive; this is acceptable when their cost of construction can be amortised over more devices, but we're already at the point where the global poor get smartphones before safe water, so further factory cost increases can't really be assumed to be amortised better.

That said, current LLMs are not compute constrained, they're RAM and bandwidth constrained, so a (relatively) cheap factory that's dedicated just to filling a datacenter with hardware designed specifically for one particular AI architecture, that's something I think is plausible. As @tome accidentally reminded me about recently, the not-Musk Groq (https://groq.com/) is all about this.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m never the one to defend AI, but what do you mean? Is it the “AI overview” that pops up on Google? Other than that, I would say Gemini is definitely less in your face than ChatGPT for example

My company uses google workspace and every google doc, spreadsheet, calendar, online meeting and search puts nonstop callouts and messages about using Gemini. It's gotten so bad that I'm about to try building a browser extension to block that bullshit. It clutters the UI and nags. If I wanted that crap, I'd turn it on.

Sounds like you don't like a product choice that your company made. Have you considered talking to your company?

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#236

I started doing some experimentation with this new Deep Think agent, and after five prompts I reached my daily usage limit. For $250 USD/mo that’s what you’ll be getting folks. It’s just bizarrely uncompetitive with o3-pro and Grok 4 Heavy. Anecdotally (from my experience) this was the one feature that enthusiasts in the AI community were interested in to justify the exorbitant price of Google’s Ultra subscription. I…

Several years ago I thought a good litmus test for mastery of coding is not finding a solution using internet search nor getting well written questions about esoteric coding problems answered on StackOverflow. For a while, I would post a question and answer my own question after I solved the problem for posterity (or AI bots). I always loved getting the "I've been working on this for 3 days and you saved my life" com…

Curious to know what are those challenging programming problems are. Can you share some examples?

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post misses the fact that 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing and that the overwhelming majority of developers, even ivy league graduates, suck at coding and problem solving. Thus, AI is a great productivity tool if you know how to use it for the overwhelming majority of problems out there. And it's a boost even for those that are not even good at the craft as well. This whole narrative of "okay but it can…

> 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT, and it's people who believe that and act that way who produce the tangled messes of spiderweb code that are utterly opaque to public searches and AI analysis -- the supposed "1%"), if even as low as 1% of the code I interacted with was the kind of code that required really deep thought and analysis, it could easily ballo…

> Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT)

Can you share what these "hard problems" are that > 1% of developers are working on?

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#238

You can't go anywhere without having Gemini shoved in your face. I had an immediate visceral reaction to this.

I’m never the one to defend AI, but what do you mean? Is it the “AI overview” that pops up on Google? Other than that, I would say Gemini is definitely less in your face than ChatGPT for example

The latest Samsung updates (and Pixel too I imagine?) baked it into the OS and made it difficult/impossible to disable. It’s probably that. I also agree, aside from that I haven’t seen anything about Gemini at all, I think their marketing is quite poor for something so important.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#239
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT, and it's people who believe that and act that way who produce the tangled messes of spiderweb code that are utterly opaque to public searches and AI analysis -- the supposed "1%"), if even as low as 1% of the code I interacted with was the kind of code that required really deep thought and analysis, it could easily ballo…

> Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT) Can you share what these "hard problems" are that > 1% of developers are working on?

Try using any AI tool to write a working realtime GI (global illumination) implementation. I've been working on a novel implementation for 60fps/1080p GI and everytime I use Copilot or Claude to even try fixing a minor bug/troubleshoot it nukes entire functions and rewrites them using garbled shader code, old syntax/methods.

Puts things into stark perspective for me.

PS. no amount of prompt engineering will save you in this endeavour.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

#240
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar issues with support form companies that heavily push AI and self-serve models and make human support hard. I'm very accomplished and highly capable. If I feel the need to turn to support, the chances the solution is in a KB is very slim, same with AI. It'll be a very specific situation with a very specific need.

There are a lot of internal KB's companies keep to themselves in their ticketing systems - would be interesting to estimate how much good data there is in there that could in the future be used to train more advanced (or maybe more niche or specific) AI models.

They COULD be great AI chatbots with good data, but in general what is being deployed is just crap. The cheapest app they can get set up as fast as possible so they can check a box, there's no real concern to make it good. I had a talk with my last CEO in January about a similar project, I gave a plan on how to do it right. They instead tried to half ass it and it completely failed. But they don't care because the board member that wanted it is happy because it exists.
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