Edit to add the fix: https://gist.github.com/birep/6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c3...
I use a mix of Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini holds it's own. Especially in writing, frontend, and sysadmin work. agy for configuring a NixOS system has been truly incredible.
I cancelled Ultra because they forced me into their harness like I should adapt to them, rather than the other way around.
I actually just cancelled Ultra also because I couldn't subscribe to a YouTube Family plan while I had it active (Google... :[) but trying to use Codex as a replacement while I testdrive Astra makes me yearn for agy again.
That said, compaction feels like an idea that should work reasonably well, but across all of the major providers and agent tools I've used has never actually produced compelling results, to where if I see I'm getting close to the token limit I prefer to start putting a bow on the project and readying it for a fresh start. Even when I provide a detailed compaction prompt it usually focuses on the wrong stuff.
agy --dangerously-skip-permissions
gemini-cli supported 'pre-write diff tabs' (y/n) in external editors like vscode. In Claude Code I heavily use 'pre-write diff tabs' for documentation and miss it sincerely in agy cli.
IMHO Gemini 3.8 flash is fast and good enough, but the agy-suite is below par to say it nice. Someone else in this thread calls agy a terrible harness which is probably more accurate.
I'm using it to run overnight tasks, and that's it until my quota runs out.
Canceled my subscription.
And I saw it do this twice, once for Android 14 and once for Android 16.
I think this is just within 3.8 flash's capabilities.
Including going first for decompiling AGY binary instead of searching the web for documentation...
Also I hope you don’t have children, eat meat, travel, have a car, run AC, buy things in other countries and such. Those things all take way way way more natural resources.
Patches to open source software are public goods. Your using them doesn’t prevent others from using them. So if you spend resources creating a public good, it’s in everyone’s interest to share it.
Asked pi agent it to identify the main hero sprite size of game I was running. It had a ton of shader effects so it was hard to determine.
It used some cli tools to identify that it was a game made with Godot, decompiled the executable but data was encrypted, broke the encryption after writing a brute force tool to test keys extracted from the exe, then proceeded to extract the game gd scripts and assets, only to answer the question of the sprite size.
Nobody has a moat.
One possible explanation: because Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible - combined with some willingness to burn money so that they don't strongly fall behind on their AI models.
On the other hand, OpenAI and Anthropic at least formerly concentrated on building and providing the best models that they could with concerns about financial feasibility taking a backseat.
Just to be clear: I do have the impression that by now (likely because of pressure from investors) OpenAI and Anthropic take these financial concerns more seriously, but nevertheless Google's vs OpenAI's/Anthropic's "DNAs" concerning on what to focus on differ.
There’s no magic there. You get an account executive and a call with a systems architect to find out what you’re doing.
Clouds gonna cloud, this is the reason they rolled deepmind into gcp and arguably the inverse is true, the labs are trying to become clouds
That feels right. It's not as if they've been missing out on great profits.
Because it's not an existential battle for Google. If OAI or Anthropic disappear from the absolute frontier for ~8 months the news cycle and churn will diminish them to the second rate. Google is processing near 4 quadrillion tokens every month, that's - I'm sure - significantly more than OAI or Anthropic, because Google is interested more so in their flash models and getting these competitive, which they are.
Most Google products even use flash lite underneath, so their frontier model is mostly used for distillation.
A good consideration; just one point from my side: as far as I am aware (but I may be wrong), Gemini is not known to perform well in an agentic framework.
This is no contradiction to your other claims, quite the opposite: perhaps (or even likely) Google wants to avoid that their models become a commodity in some (agentic?) application where the middleman who actually writes this application gets a disproportionate of the money that the customer of the application pays for it.
I used it for a month over the summer, right before they were going through the migration to antigravity. It was a fine workhorse IMO, no complaints from me.
Meanwhile, Anthropic/OpenAI will struggle to survive the next 24 months on their current trajectory.
Data centers are important but a few others also has them: Amazon, Microsoft, Meta. SpaceX will likely be in/at the top I AI dedicated precessing power in 2027 as well.
I don't see the moat. I see a company with a lot of other commitments that is not the best at delivering consumer facing products. They have some good cards but so do others.
Custom hardware, data centers, huge cash reserves, deep/broad talent pool, and non-AI customer base are all huge advantages if not moats.
Google, Microsoft, or Amazon are more likely to be the AI leaders than OpenAI or Anthropic.
If not now, then when will these companies be AI leaders?
Even Google, with its staggering advantages in cash, compute, real estate, training data, and having basically invented the field only manages to briefly claim a 1-2 week lead once or twice a year.
Google is already on gen 8 of its TPUs and is certainly already working on the next version or two.
I'm sure the thinking out there, and hence investment, is all about how to tether the user to the most addictive, network-effected, incredibly deep, server-side, moat-able version of AI possible.
For now, for cloud training. but for consumers, nvidia vs amd reasonably close - the moat there is thin and shrinking. I suspect AMD will surprise us. nvidia has no motes in china, which may be a new source of (gpu) chip design. Huawei's Ascend 910C is about a generation behind... again: for now.
point is: moats dry up. I see nvidia's shrinking as a real possibility.
Are you sure?
--
China Just Built What TSMC Said Was Impossible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk-w279ESHg
--
China Just Built What ASML Feared Most
---
maybe it's this Anthropic post on GLM?
https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...
> Governments should conduct safety testing on sufficiently capable AI models, including successors to GLM-5.3. Without high-quality evaluations from independent sources, the impact of these capabilities might not become fully clear to model developers until it is too late. As AI developers across the world build increasingly capable open-weight models, we hope they work to appropriately safeguard these capabilities and prevent misuse.
I for one do not think my government is up to the task of designing or implementing such a system
OpenAi is alledged to have been monitoring these internally and not contacting authorities. Lawsuits have been filed, I see gross negligence without the gory details
I have for more concerns around human-chatbot maladies than I do around the cyber security stuff. For example, why hack grandma when you can get her to do something willingly through impersonation. How do we prove authenticity in a post truth world?
This is the kind of story that ones tells to investors to justify the huge amount of cash burn. :-)
I think many/most of the players will crash and burn, and the ones that are left will divide the world.
The net effect is that the most likely scenario is if one big lab fails, they will likely all fail. Their revenues are all correlated.
To go to your dotcom comparison, the winner will be the ones picking through the assets that were written down by orders of magnitude and trying new products with the technology until one sticks to the wall. But I don't know if a dramatic crash is guaranteed either.
Concerning the leverage on energy and real estate: don't forget that the AI companies have quite a lot of choice where to build their data centers. So AI companies have lots of opportunities to play several parties off against each other (in particular also for real estate and energy).
Uhm, what? LOL.
People dont value firms based on balance sheets fella. Have you taken a basic valuation class?
Tesla is a nice stock for traders - they like the volatility. Nobody holds Tesla as stock for investing. If you were to truly value it on an intrinsic value basis you'd have to bring in failure risk.
I think that would be a pretty satisfactory outcome compared to one hypercompany consuming trillions of dollars of the world economy.
Internet access is not really unlimited, but for many people with fiber at home, it effectively is and we pay a flat rate.
Perhaps by the end of next year, most programmers will stop thinking about metered access for AI? For many people, the cheaper models (about as good as today’s frontier models) will be good enough.
Which might sound good, but the downside is that it will also be easier to build an AI botnet without the users paying for it noticing. Particularly when people are running AI inference on their own hardware.
My guess is even if the AI market busts there is still a massive demand for hardware as models are solving all kind of problems now.
But ya, lots of hardware everywhere not managed well is how you get sovereign AI.
I would argue those who already rule the world, will continue to do so.
What happens to OAI and Anthropic? No idea, probs go bust. Google just has to offer a half-decent offering in the long run and have a cost-advantage and it'll eventually knock OAI and Anthropic out as firms figure out what combination of models they want to be best for their economics and generating returns. Enterprises trust google over OAI and Anthropic. A clear signal of this was the Apple deal.
Dont forget those sweet returns fellas! CEO's are hired to make the owners wealthier. That is not gone.
The story that some AI company might reach singularity and then "everything will be different" is another science-fiction story that executives of AI companies love to tell to justify the staggering amount of necessary investments and cash burn. :-)
Whoever builds the deathstar wins!
The slightly lower Chinese open models are good enough for almost everything, too, and much cheaper. Like with humans there is plenty of employment for people with below genius level IQ's.
Not if the genius level IQs take the market share.
And Chinese labs openly publishing so much of their methodology destroyed any hope, which was inevitable
I think the secrecy doesn't make sense. People swap jobs between labs so I'd say the big players can' really keep secrets for long, and any secret sauce advantage gets incorporated by competitors in a major product cycle at most.
This is marketing from Google, not a competitive offering
So far, that's not exactly how it's played out. Humans are still necessary for the leaps in capability or efficiency. A model can grind on a problem to eke out the most performance, and models can synthesize data and iterate on various techniques to find the optimal combination. But, seems like humans still have to provide the real thinking, and the talent and drive for doing that is not concentrated in one company or city or even one country. And, (surprisingly) a lot of the people involved are in it for advancing the field more than making another billion dollars, so they're publishing their research.
So, yeah, the moat isn't deep. Even the compute moat, that OpenAI, Musk, and a bunch of other also-rans (like Oracle) bet the farm on, isn't really panning out. The Chinese makers just spent their effort on making models vastly more efficient, since they couldn't do anything about having an order of magnitude less compute available.
They're not there yet. Once they get there, that's literally the definition of Singularity.
But they are getting closer. Recursive Self-Improvement used to be a phrase people mocked LessWrong crowd for using and worrying about, now it's something both OpenAI and Anthropic already publicly admitted not only to pursue, but to already be benefiting from.
So far, I don't think the models are capable of running away on their own. Of course, it would be playing with fire to not at least consider the risks of such a runaway scenario and build in safeguards against it. But, there is no model that can build a better model on its own, thus far, to the best of my knowledge (which is far more limited than the models, so maybe I should ask them).
It starts with what they already claim to be doing - increasingly relying on existing models in non-trivial work related to training, evaluating and optimizing the next, more capable generation of models. As long as the proportion of work keeps shifting towards agents doing more and more of it, and humans less and less, that's RSI at play.
It may be that it turns out LLMs lack some fundamental level of judgement and it plateaus, but frankly I find this notion absurd; LLMs already show better judgement than most people. The alternative is, at some point LLMs will show the ability to futz their way into improvement of the next generation of models even without humans in the loop - even if much less efficient at first, if generation N+1 is more capable than generation N, it'll either take off or burn out.
At least they’re led by trustworthy and honest people or we’d need to take their claims with some dose of skepticism.
Gemini not beating the "can't release a model" allegations
What is your reason to believe this is not a bug specific to a small set of Pro users?
ok bro thx
I already pay $300+ for subs. Please don't tempt me with another $100 sub just because I got curious if the benchmarks were right.
They even gave their model a random nonsensical name suffix simply because OpenAI is now doing it, too. Monkey see, monkey do.
I was going to say I don't know what they'd do for C, since Carbon and Calcium are already things. But knowing Google, they'll probably call it Chromium.
Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1, literally state of the art (in their respective class), were just released without any prior announcement. This has pure and simple become a Google thing.
Edit: seems I was wrong about Anthropic restricting Fable, I guess our enterprise plan doesn't include it. But, the block from Anthropic regarding Mythos for regular subscribers/enterprise-users is still true I think.
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
I was excited to see what it would be. But I don't think I can argue that it makes as much sense anymore.
The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better
It's DOA because Google doesn't have any idea of what Carbon should be, and to be completely honest, at least 80% of what they currently use C++ for should be rewritten Go, you know, that language developed specifically because of the issues with C++ by teams within Google.
Imagine they aren't even familiar with rust but are deeply familiar with the product.
It was clearly done because some PL guys at google really wanted to make a new cool language and Google was the perfect place to incubate it without it getting axed. Probably got a couple of promos out of it too. This is clearly not the best use of time or money, but I guess if you're google you have so much of both it probably doesn't really make a dent, and you can keep a few very smart people happy with shiny new projects.
Also, LLMs being used for a large portion of coding nowadays sort of remove the need for these types of languages, IMO. They make less "silly" bugs (both logical and structural) that languages like this are meant to catch, and they are much better at languages that are better represented in the training corpus. This somewhat obviates the need for very niche "type/dummy-safe" languages like carbon (and even rust/zig, imo). So even if you did want to use Carbon, you'd likely have to bootstrap a decent amount of your own "good" carbon code to post train an LLM, and even then, it likely won't have that big of a gain vs just having an LLM write C++ or even Rust. If you are a company that still reviews code, you should just have an LLM code in a language most people can understand anyway to make verifiability tractable.
Such rewrites will contain judicious uses of Cell, RefCell, unwrap() etc. which make for ugly code that's not exactly simple to understand and might even have some landmines (crashes).
Getting rid of these requires a subtantial amount of engineering effort, which I'm not sure how well these LLM manage.
Given the nigh-universal experience of LLMs producing an ungodly mess when left to their own devices, I have my concerns.
I’m not entirely sure Google should have both Go and Carbon but when you have billions in server costs it makes sense to do extreme stuff for even basis points of performance. I’m still surprised at how much java there is.
They did that for Go and it seems to have worked out for them though.
I personally think that you _could_ use an LLM to catch these types of boundary case errors without having to port the _entire_ C++ codebase to Rust, but maybe pre-emptively porting to Rust now can catch some of these cases for cheaper than doing a full LLM sweep. Also more cynically, its a good benchmark lol.
I guess if you really believe in curve of LLM capabilities you should just use a language that has the best performance, safety, flexibility, and extensibility, since in the limit few/no people will actually read the code anyway. I think this ends up being Rust.
The other thing is just that rewriting some old human-written codebase in Rust probably immediately catches many bugs. It would be hard to prompt the AI to properly scan for such bugs itself, they're lazy when working in that modality.
It’s absurd to think that Carbon is the solution to memory safety when rust exists and Carbon’s memory safety story is basically “TBD”.
Considering, Gemini 4 is in the same ballpark as SOTA models, just open source it and kill any competition from openAI and Anthropic, and be market leader.
This will be so good on so many dimensions - buying time for Google to iterate on next model, best for all folks like us, kill funding or destroy valuation of competitors and force them to be open up their model or force them to a create a much superior model than open source Gemini.
Only downside, is revenue loss from Gemini API, which I am not sure is really significant as compared to Google other revenue sources and a part of this can be captured by GCP, as you need to host the model somewhere.
I am just trying to understand - why Google haven't done and have no plans for it. They have done it for Android and have Gemma models too.
This is good, but they're the slow mover due to this exact thing.
Google is getting punished for not letting the models enter an echo chamber and go faster than humanly possible.
So no, Google is not being punished, nor are they the people behind this technique.
they use a small model to make fake chain of thought and return that.
google has access to the real chain of thought.
To me this is way more significant than other random c++-to-rust-AI-rewrite. If they can pull it off on core C++ libraries en masse, I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years.
I look forward to a post from google on this effort.
And people are worried about human extinction when this is the potential trade-off!
C++'s death cannot come soon-enough.
Seriously though, things have changed so incredibly rapidly in the past year or so. I have never been such an efficient or such a proficient engineer than I have this past year (delivering feature after feature, project after project, faster and better than I could before with better feedback from users etc) and I don't even see the code any more. It could be c++, it could be python, or java or what ever - I don't really care any more: the computer deals with that trivia while I concentrate on what to build and how it should work.
Its amazing. It really is.
(Full disclosure: I am one of the coauthors)
The standards body members are still fighting about whether memory safety is important enough to change the language for, so, I would guess the answer is "no".
[0] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...
I don't _want_ to use aistudio. The UX is confusing and I don't really know where it fits. Yet I can open codex or claude code apps or CLI and get real work done today with the latest models (even on the cheapest plans).
Only theory is team wanted this out before perf/promo reviews to kick it over the line and then its not their problem
It's also kinda wild how the competition being at v6.1 makes 3.x feel ancient, at least saying you are at v4 now changes public perception a bit imo.