I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?

As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly.

I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.

I’m wondering if they even see a coding agent as a valuable prize. It’s a competitive market in a race to the bottom economically, hard to establish consistent differentiation and virtually zero switching cost for customers.

I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.

Anecdata, but I've been using gemini personally instead of what I used regular google searches for the better part. Even in car chat/search and some lighter and not so light research (if it's not heavy on technicals). It's good enough that I use it nonstop like that. I wouldn't trust it for coding at all - switching between fable and now astra.

Google in a sense won (me over) like that. I also expected them to brute force their way into everything and dominate. This is how it played out though. Image generation is great as well, but ChatGPT one is more lenient on copyright and nannying - for example when my kid asks me to "take a photo of him and Sonic". Gemini cops out either because of the kid or Sonic, disappointing us both, but ChatGPT can be.. persuaded.

Considering how far backwards Google has gone since the release of the 3.x models, the brain drain they've let happen, the lacklustre software ecosystem and their track record with product management ... I would say they're more likely to drop trying to compete at the frontier and try to focus on something else instead.

For me 3.8 has been good enough that I don’t think I’ll be extending my Claude subscription.

For coding models? I don't think Google is motivated to fight in that market. There's no incentive for them.

Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.

Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do.

Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow.

Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there).

I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you.

Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.

I have a shared understanding for what you're asking, but semantic versioning doesn't even make sense for AI models

these are essentially monthly releases, the dated releases that Deepseek and Qwen do make more sense

If Google didnt have their ad buisness theiy'd be out by now. They're like BlackBerry and Nokia at this point almost.