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Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

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331–340 of 512 posts

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market The challenge is trust. Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. It's hard to justify committing developers and money to a product when there's a good chance you'll just have to pivot again once they get bored. Say what you w…

> they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow . I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.

> products that don't grow.

I think we all acknowledge this.

The question is seldom "why" they kill it (I'd argue ultimately it doesn't matter), it's about how fast and what they offer as a migration path for those who boarded the train.

That also means the minute Gemini stops looking like a growing product it's gone from this world, where Microsoft backed alternatives have a fighting chance to get some leeway to recover or pivot.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#332

Big companies can be slow to pivot, and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. But, once they do get moving in the right direction the can achieve things that smaller companies can't. Google has an insane amount of talent in this space, and seems to be getting the right results from that now. Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market, but hard…

> Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market The challenge is trust. Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. It's hard to justify committing developers and money to a product when there's a good chance you'll just have to pivot again once they get bored. Say what you w…

> But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products.

I don't know about that: my wife built her first SME on Google Workspace / GSuite / Google Apps for domain (this thing changed names so many times I lost track). She's now running her second company on Google tools, again.

All she needs is a browser. At one point I switched her from Windows to OS X. Then from OS X to Ubuntu.

Now I just installed Debian GNU/Linux on her desktop: she fires up a browser and opens up Google's GMail / GSuite / spreadsheets and does everything from there.

She's a happy paying customer of Google products since a great many years and there's actually phone support for paying customers.

I honestly don't have many bad things to say. It works fine. 2FA is top notch.

It's a much better experience than being stuck in the Windows "Updating... 35%" "here's an ad on your taskbar" "you're computer is now slow for no reason" world.

I don't think they'l pull the plug on GSuite: it's powering millions and millions of paying SMEs around the world.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just saying" things that are false. Google Cloud grew 35% year over year, when comparing the 3 months ending September 30th 2024 with 2023. https://abc.xyz/assets/94/93/52071fba4229a93331939f9bc31c/go... page 12

Isn't that the typical interpretation of what the parent comment said? How is it false?

35% over 12 months != 35% over 3 months.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#334
post #86

Big companies can be slow to pivot, and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. But, once they do get moving in the right direction the can achieve things that smaller companies can't. Google has an insane amount of talent in this space, and seems to be getting the right results from that now. Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market, but hard…

With many research areas converging to comparable levels, the most critical piece is arguably vertical integration and forgoing the Nvidia tax. They haven't wielded this advantage as powerfully as possible, but changes here could signal how committed they are to slaying the search cash cow. Nadella deservedly earned acclaim for transitioning Microsoft from the Windows era to cloud and mobile. It will be far more impr…

> Nadella deservedly earned acclaim for transitioning Microsoft from the Windows era to cloud and mobile.

You mean by shifting away from Windows for mobile and focusing on iOS and Android?

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or… just continue using Claude?

Claude is ridiculously expensive and often subject to rate limiting.

lol, and you think Google is going to be less subject limiting?

I will pay more to not feed Google.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#336
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These models take an instruction, along with any contextual information, and are trained to produce valid output. That production of output is a form of reasoning via _some_ type of logical processing. No? Maybe better to say computational reasoning. That’s a mouthful.

Static computation is not reasoning (these models are not building up an argument from premises, they are merely finding statistically likely completions). Computational thinking/reasoning would be breaking down a problem into an algorithmic steps. The model is doing neither. I wouldn't confuse the fact that it can break it into steps if you ask it, because again that is just regurgitation. It's not going through tha…

Models trained to do chain-of-thought do it without any specific prompting, and a specific system prompt that enables this behavior is often part of the setup, because that is what the model was trained on.

I don't see how that is "regurgitation", either, if it performs the reasoning steps first, and only then arrives at the answer.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#337

It is interesting to see that they keep focusing on the cheapest model instead of the frontier model. Probably because of their primary (internal?) customer's need?

It's cheaper and faster to train a small model, which is better for a research team to iterate on, right? If Google decides that a particular small model is really good, why wouldn't they go ahead and release it while they work on scaling up that work to train the larger versions of the model?

On the other hand, once you have a large model, you can use various distillation techniques to train smaller models faster and with better results. Meta seems to be very successful doing this with Llama, in particular.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#338

Buried in the announcement is the real gem — they’re releasing a new SDK that actually looks like it follows modern best practices. Could be a game-changer for usability. They’ve had OpenAI-compatible endpoints for a while, but it’s never been clear how serious they were about supporting them long-term. Nice to see another option showing up. For reference, their main repo (not kidding) recommends setting up a Kuberne…

Oh wow, it supports directly specifying a Pydantic model as an output schema that it will adhere to for structured JSON output. That’s fantastic!

https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#339
post #278
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't help. Their TOS and policies are vague enough that they can terminate all accounts you own (under "Use of multiple accounts for abuse" for instance).

To be fair, I believe this is reserved for things like fighting fraud.

Even if it is warranted on their part, the 1% false positive will be detrimental to those affected. And we all know there is no way to reach out to them in case the account is automatically flagged.

Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era

#340
I tried accessing Gemini 2.0 Flash through Google AI Studio in the Safari browser on my iPhone, and to my surprise it worked. After I gave it access to my microphone and camera, I was able to have a pretty smooth conversation with it about what it saw through the camera. I pointed the camera at things in my room and asked what they were, and it identified them accurately. It was also able to read text in both English and Japanese. It correctly named a note I played on a piano when I showed it the keyboard with my finger playing the note, but it couldn’t identify notes by sound alone.

The latency was low, though the conversation got cut off a few times.

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