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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1632 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's a gross mistake to conflate a setback with defeat, when it comes to Google. They were floundering with Bard. They made a strong recovery, and were competitive again, falling back only after Gemini 3.1 Pro was a disappointment.

Gemini 3.6 Flash has just been knee-capped by OAI making 5.6 Luna 80% cheaper. But this is the company that invented Transformers, and which has talent, TPUs and more money than God. I don't have very high expectations of the upcoming 3.5 Pro, but it only takes a bit of huffing and puffing to get back to the frontier for another month or two.

Their AI overviews use a cheap and cheerful model, simply because of the ridiculous scale of implementation. You're not going to devote 5.6 Sol levels of intelligence for "cheap chippie in Bristol" and thereabouts.

Also, in the locally-hosted ~1-2 graphics card space, their Gemma 4 local models have been quite good for general-purpose use, even if its tool use was a bit broken. (Qwen3.6, or the really big Qwen 3.5 is still the practical frontier for coding AFAICT.)

Google having more money than God is part of their problem. It's like asking why a fat old guy is losing a footrace.

That does not outweigh their other, very real advantages. You do not want to be a cash and compute-poor lab.

You do not want to be a cash and compute-poor lab.

Hmm. Like Moonshot or DeepSeek? Every lab is cash and compute poor compared to Google.

Yes? That is not in conflict with anything I've said.

You've quite literally got the CEO of DeepSeek complaining that they can't get the GPUs necessary to reach the frontier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052912

https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundraising-amid.html?m=1

In it, Liang reportedly framed China's disadvantage as an arithmetic problem rather than a talent one: "The biggest gap between us and the US is in resources."

The specifics were unusually candid. Liang is said to have told investors he needed 200,000 Huawei 950 chips to train a frontier model but received 16,000, adding that "Huawei's problem is still insufficient capacity" and expecting the crunch to last at least three years. He also floated narrowing the gap with US labs to three to six months using a fraction of their computing.

You can do remarkable things with grit, determination, the willingness to eat unsalted rice (and by distilling Claude), but that won't get you to the frontier before the frontier moves on.

Liang laments not having enough compute, you know. It is a handicap.

Of course he's going to complain. More helps more. They are, however, at the (pareto) frontier.

The pareto frontier is not the same as being at the frontier. Making a capable, well priced and adequate midranger is not what anyone wants to settle for when the best of the best are solving maths and dangling the promise of RSI. You want to be at the bleeding edge.

It's not about mid-range anymore. K3 is quite close on the index to the absolute top of the line. Some say Chinese models are still six months behind, some say the gap is closing, but nobody thinks it's increasing. It's also quite clear that they don't have the compute that the US had six months ago. Seems you don't need it to reach that level of performance.

Google needs to keep acquiring hungry talent and keep it away from the warm, suffocating embrace of their internal bureaucracy - not an easy problem to solve. Cash and compute are the table stakes to compete, but they don't win you the competition.

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