| ▲ | WarmWash 5 hours ago |
| For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with. I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has. |
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| ▲ | alansaber 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Agreed. My impression is that the more verbose output of sol, astra etc is that it helps it steer itself on long running tasks (but is worse for the human user to read) |
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| ▲ | lilbigdoot 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | porridgeraisin 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, when post training models for long tasks this happens gradually. It is not easy to prevent it as such. |
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| ▲ | pkulak 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is Google still chasing frontier? Seems like they haven't had a "Pro" model in forever. I think a good niche for them would be right where they are now. |
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| ▲ | kylecazar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | spwa4 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | These are native speech-to-speech models, so I think they've decided not to do that anymore. |
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| ▲ | amelius 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How do you know you're using Astra? My ChatGPT env only says "low", "medium", "high". Is this a "pro" thing? I have totally no idea what I'm talking to, so actually I'm thinking of stopping my plan. Gemini and Claude are much more clear about it. Anyway, I like the speed at which Gemini responds so indeed for simple things it is preferable. |
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| ▲ | comex an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | willy_k an hour ago | parent [-] | | For the old school (I hate that that’s arguably applicable) AI dating types, and so on. The people using it not for productivity. |
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| ▲ | drivebyhooting 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times). Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos. |
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| ▲ | re5i5tor 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | “caveats and provisos” makes me think of Robin Williams’ genie imitating William F. Buckley Jr. | | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos. Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like. | | |
| ▲ | Someone1234 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is commonly why, on Reddit in particular, you can get eaten alive. Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident. Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writing shorter replies on Reddit is rewarded. Nobody reads the articles, let alone a paragraph-long reply. That all being said though, there are limits. Sometimes LLMs on high-thinking go off on full tangents based on little, and don't have the self-awareness to bring it back. | | |
| ▲ | JW_00000 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I consider, on the contrary, caveating and hedging annoying 'typical redditor'/internet behaviors: they care more about being "technically correct" than conveying the message. On the internet, if you make even the tiniest mistake or simplification, someone will criticize you, so you're trained to always hedge. In normal discussions with friends you can just make general statements and people get what you mean. | |
| ▲ | nostrebored 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In my experience actual experts don’t hedge because they have a perspective. They might say “I think”, but avoid weaseling. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths an hour ago | parent [-] | | My experience has been very much the opposite of yours. To an expert communicating with a layperson is a form of compression. You must turn some very complex idea into one that you suppose the other person can grasp given their limited frame of reference. It's always lossy, and you have to guess how much you can remove without sounding patronizing or being inaccurate. It's tough, and the more you know the tougher it gets. Ever done that "explain what happens when I visit Google in my web browser" interview question? A sales guy will answer in a sentence. An engineer might be able to talk about it for several days and still not be sure they didn't miss anything important. That much knowledge can actually be detrimental to communication. |
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| ▲ | drivebyhooting 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And sometimes that’s what trying to sound smart sounds like. | |
| ▲ | copperx 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yup. Reality is full of special cases. |
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| ▲ | jakderrida 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "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. | | |
| ▲ | avereveard 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep the only way out is hooks to forbid what can be detected by ast and second model to prune comments, flatten pyramids of fallback, and squash the test suite removing quirks maintaining wanted behaviors. |
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| ▲ | porridgeraisin 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | lxgr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| For rabbit holes, how do you get Gemini to do any research before answering? I've very recently had it hallucinate on me like it's 2023, and that was on Pro/Thinking, as far as I remember. |
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| ▲ | chicagobuss an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's entirely possible that in their testing of newer models, the whole problem is that even if it's doing better in benchmarks, maybe it's insufferable to work with, thus they're not releasing it. |
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| ▲ | martythemaniak 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Good news then, I don't think they're in a hurry to catch up to SOTA. |
