Meanwhile, here's Gemini in practice:

Me: Gemini, navigate to nearest McDonalds.

Gemini: [Lists 10 McDonalds locations wnd asks which I want.]

Me: What were the priginal instructions just now?

Gemini: [Recites imperatives about tone and content from its memory system.]

Me: No. I told you to navigate to the NEAREST McDonalds. There's only one NEAREST McDonalds. Do that one.

Gemini: My mistake, navigating to the nearest McDonalds. [Opens Maps, navigating to a McDonalds across town.]

Pretty sure your phone assistant isn't using their best model. It's probably using one of the old flash models no?

This reflects pretty much every result of mine from Google these days. Not just navigation, but search too.

The only thing I can figure is that Google's consumer-facing free-to-use models are set to "reason as fast as possible with only the most basic plausibility checks." I have to correct them like this every single time.

The first law of robotics prevents it from facilitating regular ingestion of low-quality nutrients.

Gemini Flash is very dumb and gimped. Recent experience:

1. I ask it to list out all my old Keep notes that are just throwaway task lists, reminders, etc. to propose deleting them.

2. It comes up with like 4 of them (I know for a fact there are dozens, if not hundreds). I ask it for an exhaustive list.

3. I see its thinking trace briefly show "Refusing to produce an exhaustive list..." and then it says "Yes, that is all of them."

Not sure whether it's lack of intelligence, bad tools, or both, but that was extremely frustrating to see.

this is like that tiktok guy who asks the spoken ChatGPT model very simple questions, like 'count down from 60', or 'how many e's in seventeen' or whatever and the model shits the bed every time it's hilarious

I think these companies have good models but expose them poorly like others have mentioned

My Gemini app on Android does not even have an exact location permission you could give it, so I'm not sure how you think that would work?

If it had exact location access people would be crying that Gemini steals their location data.

Often it seems like the problem with the Gemini apps is the harness, not the model itself. For example if I upload an image PDF it recognizes text worse than if I use the API.

Is this from you car ? Gemini in car is probably less intelligent than a spider.

I tell it to "Play Let it go from frozen". It plays it on youtube music. 5 seconds later I tell it again 'Play let it go from frozen" it then just dies saying "I can't play videos in car".

The auto version is extra horrible because what it reads to you is just a summary of what the model actually said. I don't ask it anything when driving because it's too frustrating.

Yeah, whatever they have running on Google Maps is probably a pretty low tier model, but it is total trash. I’ve only used it twice though and that’s when it first came out. I don’t know if there have been any changes since then. The main problem is I felt like it was not keeping track of the context of the session.

Gemini models are in fact very good. Google's harness(es) for Gemini are nightmares, terrible

It sounds like the tool call is probably not grounded with your precise position.

Sounds like it might not have your precise location in context?

I hate to be that guy, but Tesla's Grok doesn't seem to have that problem.