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Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#711
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software tool takes a higher-level input to produce the executable. I'm waiting for LLMs to integrate directly into programming languages. The discussions sound a bit like the early days of when compilers started coming out, and people had been using direct assembler before. And then decades after, when people complained about compiler bugs and poor optimizers.

Exactly, I also see code generation to current languages as output only an intermediary step, like we had to have those -S switches, or equivalent, to convince developers during the first decades of compiler existence, until optmizing compilers took over. "Nova: Generative Language Models for Assembly Code with Hierarchical Attention and Contrastive Learning" https://arxiv.org/html/2311.13721v3

We still have those - S switches, and are still useful for the cases where an optimizing compiler could screw you ;)

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an unsubstantiated claim. I doubt this is true, since people are disproportionately more willing to pay for the best of the best, rather than for something worse.

“Every” is unsubstantiated but probably accurate. Meta has published theirs (behemoth) and it’s clear this is largely how frontier models are being used and trained right now: too slow and expensive for daily driving inference, distillable at various levels for different tradeoffs.

DeepSeek-V3 is not a distilled model, which already disproves the "every" claim. And if you happen to have a model which is better than any other available model, it makes no sense to not use it just because it is allegedly "too slow and expensive". Inference speed is highly unimportant compared to absolute model performance. If inference speed was so important, everyone would use small models. But most people use huge models, the best of the best, like GPT-4o, o3, Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini 2.5 Pro. People don't prefer Gemini 2.5 Flash to Gemini 2.5 Pro. And people don't pay for ChatGPT Plus to get more access to faster models, they pay to get access to better, slower models. People want quality from their LLM, not quantity.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

This subthread turned into a flamewar and you helped to set it off here. We need commenters to read and follow the guidelines in order to avoid this. These guidelines are especially relevant:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a software development company with dozens of staff across multiple countries. Gemini has us to the point where we can actually stop hiring for certain roles and staff have been informed they must make use of these tools or they are surplus to requirements. At the current rate of improvement I believe we will be operating on far less staff in 2 years time.

[flagged]

I replied to the follow-up comment about following the guidelines in order to avoid hellish flamewars, but you played a role here too with a snarky, sarcastic comment. Please be more careful in future and be sure to keep comments kind and thoughtful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#715
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see the burden of proof has been reversed. Isn't this just a pot calling the kettle black? I'm not sure why either side has the rightful position of "my opinion is right until you prove otherwise". We're talking about predictions for the future, anyone claiming to be "right" is lacking humility. The only think going on is people justifying their opinions, no one can offer "proof".

> Isn't this just a pot calling the kettle black? New expression to me, thanks. But yes, and no. I’d agree in the sense that the null hypothesis is crucial, possible the main divider between optimists and pessimists. But I’ll still hold firm that the baseline should be predicting that transformer based AI differs from humans in ability since everything from neural architecture, training, and inference works different…

I think the difference it that computers tend to be pretty good at thing we can do autonomically- ride a bike, drive a car in non-novel/dangerous sitations and things that are advanced versions of unreasoned speech - regurgitations/reformulations of things it can gather from a large corpus and cast into it’s neural net.

They fail at things requiring novel reasoning not already extant in its corpus, a sense of self, or an actual ability to continuously learn from experience, though those things can be programmed in manually as secondary, shallow characteristics.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why coding agents et al don't make use of the AST through LSP is a question I've been asking myself since the first release of GitHub copilot. I assume that it's trickier than it seems as it hasn't happened yet.

My guess is that it doesn’t work for several reasons. While we have millions of LOCs to train models on, we don’t have that for ASTs. Also, except for LISP and some macro supporting languages, the AST is not usually stable at all (it’s an internal implementation detail). It’s also way too sparse because you need a pile of tokens for even simple operations. The Scala AST for 1 + 2 for example probably looks like this,…

> While we have millions of LOCs to train models on, we don’t have that for ASTs

Agreed, but that could be generated if it made a big difference.

I do completely take your points around the instability of the AST and the length, those are important facets to this question.

However, what I (and probably others) want is something much, much simpler. Merely (I love not having to implement this so I can use this word ;) ) check the code with the completion done (so what the AI proposes) and weight down completions that increase the number of issues found from the type-checking/linting/lsp process.

Honestly, just killing the ones that don't parse properly would be very helpful (I've noticed that both Copilot and the DBX completers are particularly bad at this one).

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#717
post #711
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I also see code generation to current languages as output only an intermediary step, like we had to have those -S switches, or equivalent, to convince developers during the first decades of compiler existence, until optmizing compilers took over. "Nova: Generative Language Models for Assembly Code with Hierarchical Attention and Contrastive Learning" https://arxiv.org/html/2311.13721v3

We still have those - S switches, and are still useful for the cases where an optimizing compiler could screw you ;)

Hence why we will eventually get AI Explorer, but not everyone needs that level of detail. :)

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gemini deep research is a revelation. I obsessively research most things I buy, from home appliances to gym equipment. It has literally saved untold hours of comparisons. You get detailed reports generated from every website including youtube reviews. I've bought a bunch of stuff on it's recommendation.

care to share your search prompt?

Oh, really nothing special. I'll say something simple like "Which home gym leg press machine will give the best bang for my buck?"

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because we dont just write software. Lolok. Neither do many using “AI” so what’s your point exactly? It’s an odd thing to brag about being a dime a dozen “solutions” provider.

It means what it says. We dont just write software. An LLM cannot do the service that the company provides because it isnt just software and digital services.

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