Hacker News

I have a similar experience using Gemini for quick Catalan translations for iOS apps given enough context.

I once asked it to summarize The Hobbit in Catalan to explain it to my daughter before sleep. I was expecting a lot of mistakes as I see regularly if I ask anything in my native language when using GPT or Claude, but it was surprisingly good. I was going just to kind of skim ahead and retell it my own way, but ended up almost saying it verbatim because it was good already.

She loves Zelda so I asked it to explain the story of Breath of The Wild keeping the original names, and to make it fun, etc.. I was surprised again. I did retell some bits in my own style and taste but it is very convincing.

I haven't tried Catalan on newer models like GTP-6 Astra or Fable tho. We have all these benchmarks based on software development, and AGI, etc.. but it would be cool to have some language benchmarks for different communities.

As I work in english and use them in english, I wonder if using LLMs in a different language to code renders a different result as well. Like, if some of these benchmarks were made in other languages, would the result be similar.

I love Gemini in Google Maps for long drives. I start getting bored of music and podcasts and start grilling it with random questions I've always wondered about.

Yeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.

My father-in-law was saying the same thing about Gemini 12 months ago regarding the Afrikaans speech. I've tried a few of them in my studies but none of them could seem to switch between English/Afrikaans except Gemini. It's an interesting time to be a language learner

As jy wil, ons kan saam praat op Discord :) maar my Afrikaans is sleg

I've been building a language learning app which uses AI voice chat to let people practice. Would that be something interesting for you to try out? It's all still rough, but we've been learning Japanese with it and its pretty cool.

It’s literally translation technology told to guess what’s most likely next instead of translate what it was given.

It makes total sense it’s good at regurgitating the edge cases of language.

for me the live mode in androids google translate app has been as close as it gets to perfect for traveling cannot believe it is a free service after trying so many others

[flagged]

Have you tried Gemini 3.8 Flash recently ?

I was like you before, Gemini was the worst model to me.

Then 3.8 came out. At first I was sceptical, but this model *is* able to do useful things ! Complex things.

Of course, it is NOT perfect. But for things like small/medium complex tasks subagents, it's perfect.

Now, is it worth the money vs Astra ? I don't think so. But still my point remain relevant.

I love it as a variation from the others. 3.8 flash is the best back-and-forth model for iterating imo, but would not use for long horizon

I strongly agree. I suspect it's people who have not yet used the paid models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is comparable to free models from other providers, but not in the same universe as paid models.

This is frustrating because when I discuss AI with laypeople they think it's still incapable of counting the number of Rs in "strawberry." They believe it to be essentially useless and incapable of basic tasks. Which, to be fair, is the case with the free models.

I wonder how much life DeepMind has left in it, especially after Hassabis's departure. Google execs must be having discussions about simply throwing their weight behind Anthropic since they already own so much of the company.

i have programmed a dozen scripts with google search AI lol

they'll live in my rc for decades

I agree. Lot's of people really like it. For me it often just forgets all context and starts showing random slop. It's super clear as, when I ask it what happened to some element earlier in the conversation it tells me it does not have that. It might be good if it told me, but randomly lose the plot is quite frustrating.

Claude does it occasionally but it's a more a soft landing earlier context seems to be compacted, not completely lose the plot.

I just cancelled my pro subscription. I really wanted it to be good but not yet.

Where did you try it, how can you use it? I have nothing in my Workspace (I am admin), Gemini app, AI Studio. Only 3.6 Flash

Also appears to do well in other languages (prefer that when walking & talking in public for a bit of privacy)

And looks like one can trigger live mode via siri

As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly.

I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.

I’m wondering if they even see a coding agent as a valuable prize. It’s a competitive market in a race to the bottom economically, hard to establish consistent differentiation and virtually zero switching cost for customers.

I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.

> I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra

Google has essentially give up the race for the frontier. The gap is widening very fast. Their strategy appears to be to focus on niche areas like voice, small models for on-device (see their deal with Apple), and specialised models for tasks like search, which are very inference efficient.

Anecdata, but I've been using gemini personally instead of what I used regular google searches for the better part. Even in car chat/search and some lighter and not so light research (if it's not heavy on technicals). It's good enough that I use it nonstop like that. I wouldn't trust it for coding at all - switching between fable and now astra.

Google in a sense won (me over) like that. I also expected them to brute force their way into everything and dominate. This is how it played out though. Image generation is great as well, but ChatGPT one is more lenient on copyright and nannying - for example when my kid asks me to "take a photo of him and Sonic". Gemini cops out either because of the kid or Sonic, disappointing us both, but ChatGPT can be.. persuaded.

Considering how far backwards Google has gone since the release of the 3.x models, the brain drain they've let happen, the lacklustre software ecosystem and their track record with product management ... I would say they're more likely to drop trying to compete at the frontier and try to focus on something else instead.

For me 3.8 has been good enough that I don’t think I’ll be extending my Claude subscription.

For coding models? I don't think Google is motivated to fight in that market. There's no incentive for them.

Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.

Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do.

Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow.

Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there).

I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you.

Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.

I have a shared understanding for what you're asking, but semantic versioning doesn't even make sense for AI models

these are essentially monthly releases, the dated releases that Deepseek and Qwen do make more sense

If Google didnt have their ad buisness theiy'd be out by now. They're like BlackBerry and Nokia at this point almost.

It's also the only model that generates accurate translation and localization. No other frontier model comes close. Although Gemini's coding capabilities are subpar, its natural language processing is top-tier.

For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with.

I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.

I was surprised when (finally) trying out Claude how much I preferred Gemini's way of communicating. I wont argue Claude is better at coding, but for knowledge work, I had to dig through Claude output to find what I actually wanted. At times, it even felt borderline incomprehensible.

I work for Google and we have the choice between Gemini models and Opus. Opus is slightly better than Gemini flash but I find the style unbearable.

It reminds me of a pedantic grad student.

Try Gemini live in a multi lingual environment. It can pick out speakers and live translate to you. Truly underrated for its capabilities.

I can’t agree more! It feels really smooth to drive, kind of buttery compared to other frontier experiences, at least in antigravity 2.0 or whatever. I’ve been doing some web app coding with it and I’m happy with the results.

Chatgpt doesn’t seem so bad lately. At least as a Claude refugee.

I find its style the most sycophantic and annoying personally.

In my experience, with minimum prompting, deepseek also generates very decent text.

Does anyone know if there is a dedicated model which makes Claude output nore human readable and less slop?

Lately it became load-bearingly-reality-difficult to not only read, but to comprehend the Claude output

I find Astra's prose very good, too. I have been using it to rewrite all my LLM-generated docs as of lately.

It also doesn't anthropomorphise itself, like at all.

We have an agentic system that produces insights for end users, and runs most of its work on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash but as an output stage transforms the resulting text through Gemini 3.8 Flash for readability, and it works.

On my TODO is try and run all of the analysis pipeline in dense "machine speak" to save on tokens and just let Gemini sort it out at the end.

Wondering if people have managed to have Gemini in-front of other models like claude/codex models and only interact with that. Having Gemini act as a pure human/llm translator.

Terrible for code, amazing for prose

I've set my documentation sub agent to Gemini and my code agent to Luna

Agreed. They really are the greediest when it comes to data for training (unsurprising for google I guess)

For an LLM, just being able to play an entire game of chess without illegal moves and without inventing pieces that aren't on the board is an achievement. Even more so for a live model. Then again, who knows how much the harness helped here

Playing a legal game of chess without using a guided decoding technique is a massive achievement. Ref https://aclanthology.org/2025.mathnlp-main.11/.

Seems more than good enough for a live model though! I can imagine this demo being extended to be a lot nicer to play with. You can just feed the model engine analysis and it can make as high of quality moves as needed. No longer any correlation between the model's understanding of the position and the moves that would be made but I think that's still a really nice improvement when thinking about this as adding live voice interaction to existing chess vs computer functionality rather than adding chess to possible interactions with the latest live voice model.

I am an adult, and i lose to elemental school kids in chess.

I am not so advanced enough as a human being.

agree that it’s a weird choice, but more because i don’t need my chat model to play chess at all when chess engines exist.

Ah, feel the AGI man!

They promised 3.5 Pro at their next or i/o event, but the rumor is that is never going to be released because it would have been embarrassing. They just started letting their engineers use Claude, so it sounds like things may not be going so well with Gemini

OpenAI just released the new full duplex mode to the API as gpt-live-1 or something like that. Very realistic.

3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro are included in the basic Workspace subscription. The Workspace admin has to upgrade your seat for the access to newer models ($17/mo now, $24/mo starting Jan 2027).

I'm still only seeing 3.6 Flash / 3.6 Thinking in my Google Workspace for Education account, and 3.5 Flash-Lite / 3.6 Thinking in my "Plus" plan Gmail account.

I have access to both, benchmarks are actually better on 3.7 for my task, but happy improvement over the others.

I find just letting a model record a video it can read frame by frame later works fine, Gemini 3.8 flash would be solid for that

Older versions also do that.

I'm curious to know how do people in FAANG / Bay Area tech industry see influencers like Primeagen, Theo or Casey Muratori.

Do they have a good read on the industry or completely out of touch? Or to put it simply, are they spouting bullshit?

My concern is that some of them arent in the industry or have never been in it.

well, its because gemini is sucks at coding

My issue using the voice mode is the overly expressive mimicry of natural human intonation is distracting and starts to become extremely grating after a while.

There's one or two I find more understated but I would love a 2026 SOTA V2V model that speaks clearly but without the artificial personality layered on.

Human interaction/theory of mind relies so much on non-verbal clues for interpreting emotion/intent and so for me having those neurons firing constantly while talking to an LLM just for an emotional no-op is exhausting to put up with for more than a couple minutes.

There's one male voice that would make me assume someone was sarcastically mocking me if I was talking to an actual person because it's just so over the top.

Yeah still on 3.6 here too, this is like the 4th or 5th model Google has announced since they last gave me access to the latest. And I pay for pro too!

Which one? I like Eclipse

The real question should be when will it be available on Vertex and not be full of bugs?

I've been asking the same about the open weight models, we're buying our tokens from others now, though I think those people are renting hardware from Google in the end anyway

vertex is dead, for good reason too

What makes you conclude that?

Big Ai is having a moment of reflection and reckoning with open weights, I wouldn't bet either way on a new Gemma release, 4 was distilled from the Gemini 3 series

Have you tried selecting the retry option below a reply? I think it let's you get a longer answer at least.

It’s little to do with misinformation and much to do with trying to keep their model from collapsing from ingesting too much slop.

i assume that most vibecoding has moved to CLI harnesses.

It's a slop factory over there apparently. We were sent the greatest slop deck of all time from their sales team. We now have a :cursed-claude: from a slide where they said "we have access to state of the art models like Claude 3" and nanobanana's interpretation of what Claude looks like as a person. It was clear the person had only read a handful of the nearly 40 slides

Strongly disagree with that take. Kimi K3 is a distilled model. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, or to disparage the team behind it, but distilling and building on that is significantly easier and cheaper than building from the ground up.

And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.

More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.

None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at?

My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.

Have you used Google search at all on the past few months? Every single search brings up a live chat prompt. They're serving fast AI to billions of users at huge scale everyday

And they're making money doing it.

Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?

Their live models have been and continue to be at the frontier. I like them a lot!

Yeah, you should definitely sell all Google stock you may hold, immediately, to me, before it's too late. I'm just a sucker, I'm happy to buy from you.

Uh, what? This is SOTA for a live model. What are you talking about?

It makes Meta look not that bad.

And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.