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squidbeak | on: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
egillie | parent | next
I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"
zarzavat | root | parent | next
All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
galangalalgol | root | parent | next
Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.
scottyah | root | parent | next
Gemini works amazingly well, and is better suited for most use cases. When most people speak of it negatively (especially here), it's just with the task of coding, which is a small subset of what google should be training its AI for.
wongarsu | root | parent | next
If you need a less censored model that's still pretty smart and capable of some lateral thinking, it's great

Same niche as Grok, which is also great at search and less censored. Gemini is maybe a bit smarter and better on long contexts

lII1lIlI11ll | root | parent | next
> Is Gemini really that bad?

It still produce full-blown hallucinations for me sometimes, even in 2026. The kinds ChatGPT stopped generating by 2025. It is cheap and fast though.

trollbridge | root | parent | next
It’s not bad. It’s just not better than other models. It’s very much in the same class as Grok, Cursor Grok Build, etc.
WarmWash | root | parent
It's vision capabilities are still top notch, and it seems pretty natural that most everyday human users are going to want strong vision over strong language/coding.
ethbr1 | root | parent | next
One of the most corrosive effects of being large and old (and Google is old by this point) is institutional inertia and individual internal optimization.

The former caused by the latter.

And the latter a problem once you begin to get executives and leaders who have mostly worked inside the company, because then they subconsciously prefer the Company Way(tm) to alternatives.

And Google has some previously-optimal, now-detrimental company ways.

0xpgm | root | parent | next
From my understanding (I may be wrong) what is happening now is that frontier labs are doubling down on doing RLHF on their models using the user interaction with their own tools e.g. Anthropic making their models better at producing code with claude code. Perhaps the top Google researchers do not see this kind of narrow focus as a path to more generally beneficial AI technology.
weatherlite | root | parent | next
Is it failing ? Take a look at the stock price
gniv | root | parent | next
Just because it is (was) close to all-time high doesn't mean it's high. Look at the P/E[1]. The market does not think it will grow long-term.

[1] And yes I know it's artificially lowered due to the mark-to-market gains in investments, but even without those it's low compared to peers.

Filligree | root | parent | next
Their stock price won’t matter once OpenAI launches the paperclippers.
weatherlite | root | parent
Not sure what you mean
| root | parent
{"deleted":true,"id":49194011,"parent":49193937,"time":1786004685,"type":"comment"}
estimator7292 | root | parent
Enron's stock was pretty good, too.

Stock price is not a measure of success.

ghtbircshotbe | root | parent
I feel like the majority of ai use by normal people is through Google search, so that's kind of a win.

I'm confused by meta's capex though. Are they planning on becoming a cloud provider, or just throwing money away like with the metaverse?

WarmWash | root | parent
In an interview, Zuck said that the cost of not having super intelligent AI is far more than the cost of trying to develop it.
marcuschong | root | parent | next
What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.
DrewADesign | root | parent
More like sects of a major religion. Or, a minor and incredibly expensive religion, in this case.
puzzlingcaptcha | root | parent | next
Tribalism is human nature, for better or (usually) worse.
DrewADesign | root | parent
As are mass hysteria dynamics.
ozgrakkurt | root | parent | next
It is pretty surprising if you see this as “pretty much everyone has figured out the way to success on any field”. Our way of seeing life is really bizzare
TacticalCoder | root | parent
Google owns 15% of Anthropic. They'll be winning either way.
mips_avatar | parent | next
It was inspiring watching the Gemini 3 pro team launch the model and bike away into the sunset never to launch anything again
loading story #49196961
GodelNumbering | parent | next
Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
notatoad | root | parent | next
Does that mean anything at all? They released it. Customers paid for it. Sticking a preview label on it doesn’t change that it was released
loading story #49192851
loading story #49195154
clhodapp | root | parent
That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.

That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.

aleph_minus_one | root | parent
> That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.

> That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.

My experience differs: (conservative) companies like stability, so calling some very new model "Preview" is a good idea to make it clear to the customer that this frontier model should be treated as more experimental than the default offering.

ethbr1 | root | parent | next
The problem at Google is their (lacking) process for Preview -> GA.

Maybe it's a consequence of their rigorousness around SRE, but it doesn't seem like there's a plausible and efficient path for that to happen.

Ergo, the only competitive options from Google are ever-Preview products.

clhodapp | root | parent | next
Yup. Adopting a month-old Postgres release is quite aggressive. It's much more prudent to start considering adoption after it's had six to twelve months of battle testing.

Adopting a month-old AI model version for new development is the default industry expectation right now. Adopting a six month old model is a recipe for having to migrate to a new one almost immediately, when it hits EOL.

ragall | root | parent
The process was, as we were informally told during orientation, that "Preview" means some SVP thinks this has a chance of going over the minimum threshold of 200M worldwide users and is willing to put his weight behind that product, and "GA" means the product has gone over that threshold and will be "supported" until it goes back below the threshold at which point competing SVPs will start sharpening their knives, preparing to stick them in the back of the SVP that is currently in charge of the product.
clhodapp | root | parent
That's fine, but it should still have the same technical availability level
chaostheory | parent | next
It’s a good substitute for search, but its effort is so low that it’s near useless for work compared to the other frontier AIs. Gemini focuses so much on response speed that everything else suffers.
Analemma_ | parent | next
I mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.
mountainriver | parent | next
It was always benchmaxxed