Google might not have the best coding models (yet) but they seem to have the most intelligent and knowledgeable models of all especially Gemini 3.1 Pro is something.

One more thing about Google is that they have everything that others do not:

1. Huge data, audio, video, geospatial 2. Tons of expertise. Attention all you need was born there. 3. Libraries that they wrote. 4. Their own data centers and cloud. 4. Most of all, their own hardware TPUs that no one has.

Therefore once the bubble bursts, the only player standing tall and above all would be Google.

I recently canceled my Google One subscription because getting accurate answers out of Gemini for chat is basically impossible afaict. Whether I enable thinking makes no difference: Gemini always answers me super quickly, rarely actually looks something up, and lies to me. It has a really bad unchecked hallucination problem because it prioritizes speed over accuracy and (astonishingly, to me) is way more hesitant to run web searches than ChatGPT or Claude.

Maybe the model is good but the product is so shitty that I can't perceive its virtues while using it. I would characterize it as pretty much unusable (including as the "Google Assistant" on my phone).

It's extremely frustrating every way that I've used it but it seems like Gemini and Gemma get nothing but praise here.

I agree with the theory and maybe consumers will too. But damn, the actual products are bad.

Tiny AI labs with a fraction of Google's resources still turn out amazing open weights. But besides the logistics, the other aspect is can I use it? Gemini (and some other models) have a habit of dropping conversations altogether if it's "uncomfortable" with your question. Recently I was just asking it about financial implications of the war. It decided my ideas were so crazy that I must be upset, and refused to tell me anything else about finance in that chat. Whereas other models (not abliterated, just normal models) gave me information without argument, moralizing, or gaslighting. I think most people are gonna prefer the non-nerfed models, even if they aren't SOTA, because nobody wants to have an argument with their computer.

At the start of last year Gemma2 made the fewest mistakes when I was trying out self-hosted LLMs for language translation. And at the time it had a non open source license.

Really eager to test this version with all the extra capabilities provided.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, the other thing Google has is Google. They just have to spend the effort/resources to keep up and wait for everyone else to go bankrupt. At the end of the day I think Google will be the eventual LLM winner. I think this is why Meta isn't really in the race and just releases open weight models, the writing is on the wall. Also, probably why Apple went ahead and signed a deal with Google and not OpenAI or Anthropic.