I use them. Daily. Gemini hasn’t been a contender by comparison for a long time.

Yes I've noticed there's also this drive to implement and start talking about how it would write specific portions of code in response to design/trade off questions. I have to prompt Sol/Astra almost every time with a note that I am not looking for implementation advice since I mostly use them as a rubber duck in the design phase

Yes, when post training models for long tasks this happens gradually. It is not easy to prevent it as such.

For me (Plus plan, iOS app), Astra only shows up under the Work tab.

I’ve been using Work for all my queries, since it seems to just be the same interface as Chat but with more features. I don’t understand why they’re two separate things.

They are. They were supposed to release 3.5 Pro over the summer but haven't because of persistent architectural/technical issues allegedly. Which is better than releasing it in that state imo.

Their AI leadership team has taken some hits recently too, in the form of departures. I believe when they get their bearings they will be competitive again. 3.8 Flash has been a great model for me.

These are native speech-to-speech models, so I think they've decided not to do that anymore.

“caveats and provisos” makes me think of Robin Williams’ genie imitating William F. Buckley Jr.

> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.

Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.

"couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos."

When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.

Yea. I have asked it to verify my ideas with experiments sometimes. And it cheats and warps the results so that the results are reached

I couldn't even stand 4.6 by the end. 4.5 was very usable, 4.6 started alright and somehow got more annoying. 4.7 made me quit my subscription and ditch their services entirely - it's an honourary member of my quite short "Coworkers I'd like to throttle if I didn't work remotely" list. Infuriating to instruct or communicate with.

Fable 5.1 even today inundates prose with "it's not this, it's that" type of garbage. I had to rewrite two paragraphs from a generic class announcement which I was planning to post on the LMS. Not sure where that productivity gain is that everyone is talking about.

As sister comments have pointed out, I find that it's very much dependent on the phone you're using. If it can't even show me a waveform then I don't think it's going to be able to tease out any sort of speech

"Only worked in a 1:1 in a quiet place"

well then its not model problem

BTW, as kind of a follow-up to this, I think the most important finding to report--for those who only use one model, as many people seem to--is just how much more often Claude seems to be extremely confidently (and even insufferably) wrong than any of the other three big models (all of which I use quite often... yet I only pull out Claude when I've given up hope in a problem and are looking for out-of-the-box brainstorming).

And like, it does this despite it speaking in extremely dense math, which both makes it sound correct and requires a lot more effort to prove when it is wrong... yet, it isn't actually correct more often, and so that time sink just isn't worth the benefit. I then think many people--including people who can speak math (as can I)--just stop bothering to check everything, as if you come across a human who speaks like this it probably does correlate with slow and careful thought that helps prevent errors.

Instead, Claude has the mistake rate of a somewhat accelerated beginner impossibly combined with the language of an expert professor; and we as humans just aren't good at that combination: it becomes very dangerous and makes it take longer to spot its egregious mistakes and trained-in biases. If you have to use Claude, I thereby claim you really need to have a team of not-Claudes to help insulate you from this, and Gemini (while being a bit senile) is a lot more collaborative and approaches problems in ways that makes it harder to get tricked.

(To translate this into more of an engineering analogy: Claude always feels to me like the engineer who put more effort into learning how to program in functional languages than into how to actually develop working code, and then confidently presents you answers in Haskell or Lisp that never quite work. To find their errors is then very costly. In contrast, Gemini feels more like a Java or Go developer who knows they are a cog... that's helpful! <- Which maybe just goes to show that AI has finally turned me into a manager, omg.)

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