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Notes -
Another day, another LLM
Google just launched the latest iteration of their Gemini language models. I suppose the name was most appropriate for the (short) period where the version number was precisely 2.0.
Well, everyone say hi to Gemini 2.5 Pro (Thinking). The naming scheme hasn't gotten any better, albeit Google beats the packs's abysmal average performance. It's a narrow win, folks, as there's a Gemini 2.0 Pro, a smaller and leaner 2.0 Flash, and a 2.0 Flash Lite.
(We're days away from OAI matching them with an o3-mini-high-low-too-slow.)
What stands out about this model? Nothing really. It reasons by default, which can be nice, but at the cost of increased latency for responses.
It is incrementally better on benchmarks, but even Google's PR team couldn't drum up a revolutionary new capability to showcase. They get a pass, because 2.0 Flash's image gen was revolutionary, and happened a mere week or so ago.
Gemini models have recently become the Honda Civic of LLMs. Not nearly as flashy, but reliable and with no obvious downsides. This one has seized the number one spot on LM Arena's leaderboard, based off (nominally) blinded user feedback. It might hold on to it for a week, or a month. The days when GPT-4 retained the crown for months on end are gone.
After plenty of use, all I can confidently say is that it writes better. I'm very happy with that. I'm sure someone will find a task it can do better than the rest, but I doubt it'll make anyone switch over if they're already happy. I'm confident there's something deep to be said about my inability to meaningfully differentiate models in terms of capability, be it for work or play. I'm just not going to be the one to say it today.
While we're on the topic, OpenAI just announced their 4o image model, though it's not rolled out to 100% of users yet (AKA not me yet) https://openai.com/index/introducing-4o-image-generation/ If it performs nearly as well as their cherry-picked examples, it knocks the socks off of gemini flash image gen.
Now we have Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT all releasing image editing, a previously unheard of feature, within two weeks of each other. Interesting how that happens.
When it comes to text generation models, I can't bring myself to care anymore. They all do the basics proficiently, which is generate code snippets and console commands and trivia answers to questions that I can ask in a few sentences. And they all sort of fail on really complex stuff like doing my work for me in making changes to a 1M line codebase.
Damn, if it’s better than Gemini then it looks like you were right and they were sitting on that capability. It reaffirms my opinion that OpenAI is the most insidious AI company out there.
Why insidious?
Some unordered reasons:
They call themselves OpenAI and yet nothing is open. They don’t publish research or release open source or open weight models.
They positioned themselves as a non-profit to get clout and talent and later reneges.
They charge an insane amount compared to other companies to price anchor because they want the SOTA models to only be accessible by elites.
They hide the thinking traces from their thinking models and ban people who try to figure out their methods with prompt engineering.
And then tack on “they hold back revolutionary features until their competitor releases their own”
Based on the talent banking Altman when the board tried to remove him, the talent is more than happy with the reneging.
The investors were clearly not happy. Also his chief talent, Ilya, did leave him with many other OG founders.
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