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Gemini 3.1 Pro

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Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#421

Post by threatofrain »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #378
simonw wrote: post #52

Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.

What's crazy is you've influenced them to spend real effort ensuring their model is good at generating animated svgs of animals operating vehicles. The most absurd benchmaxxing. https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF...

Animated SVG is huge. People in different professions are worrying to different degrees in terms of being replaced by ML, but this one is huge with regards to digital art.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#422

Post by gavinray »

nikcub wrote: post #287
esafak wrote: post #17

Has anyone noticed that models are dropping ever faster, with pressure on companies to make incremental releases to claim the pole position, yet making strides on benchmarks? This is what recursive self-improvement with human support looks like.

and anyone notice that the pace has broken xAI and they were just dropped behind? The frontier improvement release loop is now ant -> openai -> google

xAI just released Grok 4.20 beta yesterday or day before?

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#424

Post by verdverm »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #103
saberience wrote: post #31

I always try Gemini models when they get updated with their flashy new benchmark scores, but always end up using Claude and Codex again... I get the impression that Google is focusing on benchmarks but without assessing whether the models are actually improving in practical use-cases. I.e. they are benchmaxing Gemini is "in theory" smart, but in practice is much, much worse than Claude and Codex.

Honestly doesn't feel like Google is targeting the agentic coding crowd so much as they are the knowledge worker / researcher / search-engine-replacement market? Agree Gemini as a model is fairly incompetent inside their own CLI tool as well as in opencode. But I find it useful as a research and document analysis tool.

For my custom agentic coding setup, I use Claude Code derived prompts with Gemini models, primarily flash. It's night and day compared to Google's own agentic products, which are all really bad.

The models are all close enough on the benchmarks and I think people are attributing too much difference in the agentic space to the model itself. I strongly believe the difference is in all the other stuff, which is why Antropic is far ahead of the competition. They have done great work with Claude Code, Cowork, and their knowledge share through docs & blog, bar none on this last point imo.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#425

Post by robviren »

I have run into a surprising number of basic syntax errors on this one. At least in the few runs I have tried it's a swing and a miss. Wonder if the pressure of the Claude release is pushing these stop gap releases.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#426

Post by mijoharas »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #418
mijoharas wrote: post #205

Gemini 3 is still in preview (limited rate limits) and 2.5 is deprecated (still live but won't be for long).[0] Are Google planning to put any of their models into production any time soon? Also somewhat funny that some models are deprecated without a suggested alternative(gemini-2.5-flash-lite). Do they suggest people switch to Claude? [0] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deprecations

You are reading your link wrong. They are deprecating 2.5-preview models. 2.5 (including lite) are up till at least sept/oct 26.

gemini-2.5-pro has a listed shutdown date of "June 17, 2026" in the linked table.

(Another commenter pointed out that this is the earliest shutdown date and it won't necessarily be shut down on that date).

Where are you getting sept/Oct from? I see gemini-2.5-flash-image in October, but everything else looks like June/July to me?

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#427

Post by msteffen »

embedding-shape wrote: post #73
simonw wrote: post #52

Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.

It's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more. Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do…

> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors

Not like human programmers. I would never do this and have never struggled with it in the past, no...

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#428

Post by [deleted] »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #264
chankstein38 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up adding a "NEVER REMOVE LOGGING OR DEBUGGING INFO, OPT TO ADD MORE OF IT" to my user instructions and that has _somewhat_ fixed the problem but introduced a new problem where, no matter what I'm talking to it about, it tries to add logging. Even if it's not a code problem. I've had it explain that I could setup an ESP32 with a sensor so that I could get logging from it then write me firmware for it.

"I've had it explain that I could setup an ESP32 with a sensor so that I could get logging from it then write me firmware for it." lol did you try it? This so far from everything ratinonal

[deleted]

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#429

Post by kees99 »

cglan wrote: post #404
h14h wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be really interesting to see an "Eager McBeaver" bench around this concept. When doing real work, a model's ability to stay within the bounds of a given task has almost become more important than its raw capabilities now that every frontier model is so dang good. Every one of these models is so great at propelling the ship forward, that I increasingly care more and more about which models are the easiest to ste…

being TOO steerable is another issue though. Codex is very steerable to a fault, and will gladly "monkey paw" your requests to a fault. Claude Opus will ignore your instructions and do what it thinks is "right" and just barrel forward. Both are bad and papering over the actual issue which is these models don't really have the ability to actually selectively choose their behavior per issue (ie ask for followup where n…

I my experience Claude gradually stops being opinionated as task at hand becomes more arcane. I frequently add "treat the above as a suggestion, and don't hesitate to push back" to change requests, and it seems to help quite a bit.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#430

Post by ks2048 »

sam_1421 wrote: post #109
simonw wrote: post #52

Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.

Models are soon going to start benchmaxxing generating SVGs of pelicans on bikes

Forget the paperclip maximizer - AGI will turn the whole world into pelicans on bikes.
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