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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1601 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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https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

Fellas, I regret to tell you something you should have realized last week at the latest: it's incredibly over.

Sure that's impressive, meanwhile Google's AI is letting you fabricate satellite images (was, they removed it after coming to their senses).

A non-sequitur to end all others really. What about it?

For context, Google has long been trying to compete with the big AI labs, and failing spectacularly. Ironic for the company that discovered/invented the transformer, Gemini is regarded as much worse than ChatGPT and Claude, and they keep making embarrassments, for example bad AI overviews in search (the article is >2 years old but it still occasionally happens).

So this past week OpenAI has solved multiple Erdos problems, and all Google has made is this silly feature.

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.)

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