Interesting how the prevalent opinion until yesterday seems to have been that OpenAI & Anthropic are irreversibly ahead and now with xAI and Meta at least delivered something that's competitive with useful models and cheap too. Granted, the narrative that the two leading labs are ahead still holds with Fable (and perhaps an upcoming GPT6), but it's not as over as common knowledge by the opinion leaders would have us believe.
Think it’s less a shift in who’s ahead and instead more people acknowledging that making yet another dashboard app worked fine on last years SOTA and doesn’t really need today’s SOTA
meh, models are mostly good enough now. Without a major breakthrough the only thing that matters now is cost.
For your applications. For navigating and managing a world that lazed on a "good enough" policy, we still need the Real Thing.
Real Thing is going to come from a major breakthrough. I’m talking about competition amongst models. Difference between Fable and GPT Sol Ultra is so minor the only thing that really matters is that GPT is cheaper.
Hell, difference between Opus and Fable isn’t that big. I would still prefer Opus for most task because it’s cheaper. Break things down into smaller tasks and create deterministic parts of the process and you need the more expensive models less and less.
Anthropic needs to get their token efficiency under control or they will lose long term.
> Interesting how the prevalent opinion until yesterday seems to have been that OpenAI & Anthropic are irreversibly ahead
Not the way you're implying?
The GLM 5.2 hype was blowing way before this. Neither xAI nor Meta have really made a difference in a different way - similar results / similar pricing (to GLM 5.2).
People misinterpreted Google being behind as Anthropic and OpenAi being really ahead, when it was really just Google falling behind the same way it did with Tensorflow, Angular and GCP.
> when it was really just Google falling behind the same way it did with Tensorflow, Angular and GCP
Not sure I agree. Angular fell behind in popularity but was (is? unsure atm) still eminently usable. I gave gemini a test drive recently and it was horrendous, as in "picking dirt cheap Chinese model over gemini any day" bad, and with overzealous guardrails to boot. 3.1 pro feels a year behind and is extremely lazy. 3.5 flash feels like a model you’d run on your 128gb macbook, not something that was released a month ago and which costs a fair bit when used through api.
In any case: as of right now I think that we went from a three horse race to anthropic / openai as premium choices vs whatever is the Chinese fotm for a fraction of the cost. 3.5 pro better be a miracle if google wants to hang out with the big boys, otherwise their only strategy is hoping that both US labs go broke and they remain the last man standing.
I dont think gemini needs to be opus level though... if its there to power google search then the scale for google to operate at is enormous compared to openai/anthropic.
Gemini is more than fine as a mobile application, and will be the “brains” of the currently braindead Siri, between than and Android it’s hard to come up with an argument they are behind.
Likewise, Gemma4 models are unbeatable at their size.
So I use Gemini for coding? Hell no, but that’s not the same as Google failing writ large.
Googles only real goal is to retain the ownership and dominance of the online world they have now, and Gemini is doing exactly what it needs to do