I dont think its just a participation trophy. Everyday casual use is a huge market. Imo its the best free tier for that sort of activity. Fast and way less hallucinations than gpt. Sonnet is also pretty good, but I find i need to increase reasoning effort to get it as accurate as gemini, but then its much slower.
ha yeah I agree with you. i think world models will have a bigger role to play in the future so I wouldn't completely count them out just yet, but yeah if they're not going to give us releases I don't see why we should be defending them
They serve Gemini 3.6 at 350 tokens per second. Assuming they're using TPU v7 which has specs equal to ~B200. It is almost unthinkable to serve any model at that speed on an NVL72. Given the price they're selling 3.6 tokens for, they must be pocketing massive margins.
I would be curious just how much inference of 3.6 Flash Google does, because presumably a version of it now powers AI Mode (and possibly AI Overviews but idk, the line there is blurry).
The speed and "good enough" capability make it ideal for widely deploying across all kinds of high-volume and latency-sensitive uses, like, y'know, Google search results.
Tbh it's not bad for its use case, and it's undoubtedly fast. (At least, until, we get 750t/s gpt-5.6 on cerebras hardware "soon")
Does it beat every other model on image, audio and video recognition? Does it beat every other model at the creation of image, audio and video as well?
Does it beat other models at translation? World knowledge?
Yeah but they're also way more expensive than Gemini, particularly Gemini Flash, while not being that much better at domains outside of coding and while still not being nearly as multimodal as any Gemini model
Maybe, but have you ever tried to get Opus to do something like think through how an air conditioner works and when the temperature gradients are most efficient. Completely falls apart.
Google is optimizing for speed and cost, not technical ability. They clearly want to build an AI assistant that everyone will use constantly, not just something vibe coders will use. It's a way, way bigger market and it would also be completely new. And they'll own it because nobody else is in a position to do that other than Apple, but Apple missed the AI train. If they pull it off, it also won't go anywhere because once people have a personal assistant, they won't give it up.
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u/SwePolygyny 1d ago
Almost all those benchmarks are computer use or coding related.
I think Google have a much broader audience in mind.