Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

Also appears to do well in other languages (prefer that when walking & talking in public for a bit of privacy)

And looks like one can trigger live mode via siri

I was surprised when (finally) trying out Claude how much I preferred Gemini's way of communicating. I wont argue Claude is better at coding, but for knowledge work, I had to dig through Claude output to find what I actually wanted. At times, it even felt borderline incomprehensible.

It's also the only model that generates accurate translation and localization. No other frontier model comes close. Although Gemini's coding capabilities are subpar, its natural language processing is top-tier.

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.

Try Gemini live in a multi lingual environment. It can pick out speakers and live translate to you. Truly underrated for its capabilities.

I find Astra's prose very good, too. I have been using it to rewrite all my LLM-generated docs as of lately.

In my experience, with minimum prompting, deepseek also generates very decent text.

I find its style the most sycophantic and annoying personally.

Does anyone know if there is a dedicated model which makes Claude output nore human readable and less slop?

Lately it became load-bearingly-reality-difficult to not only read, but to comprehend the Claude output

Wondering if people have managed to have Gemini in-front of other models like claude/codex models and only interact with that. Having Gemini act as a pure human/llm translator.

We have an agentic system that produces insights for end users, and runs most of its work on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash but as an output stage transforms the resulting text through Gemini 3.8 Flash for readability, and it works.

On my TODO is try and run all of the analysis pipeline in dense "machine speak" to save on tokens and just let Gemini sort it out at the end.

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.

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.

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

Seems more than good enough for a live model though! I can imagine this demo being extended to be a lot nicer to play with. You can just feed the model engine analysis and it can make as high of quality moves as needed. No longer any correlation between the model's understanding of the position and the moves that would be made but I think that's still a really nice improvement when thinking about this as adding live voice interaction to existing chess vs computer functionality rather than adding chess to possible interactions with the latest live voice model.

agree that it’s a weird choice, but more because i don’t need my chat model to play chess at all when chess engines exist.

3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro are included in the basic Workspace subscription. The Workspace admin has to upgrade your seat for the access to newer models ($17/mo now, $24/mo starting Jan 2027).

I'm still only seeing 3.6 Flash / 3.6 Thinking in my Google Workspace for Education account, and 3.5 Flash-Lite / 3.6 Thinking in my "Plus" plan Gmail account.

I have access to both, benchmarks are actually better on 3.7 for my task, but happy improvement over the others.

OpenAI just released the new full duplex mode to the API as gpt-live-1 or something like that. Very realistic.

It's a slop factory over there apparently. We were sent the greatest slop deck of all time from their sales team. We now have a :cursed-claude: from a slide where they said "we have access to state of the art models like Claude 3" and nanobanana's interpretation of what Claude looks like as a person. It was clear the person had only read a handful of the nearly 40 slides

Which one? I like Eclipse

Yeah still on 3.6 here too, this is like the 4th or 5th model Google has announced since they last gave me access to the latest. And I pay for pro too!

I've been asking the same about the open weight models, we're buying our tokens from others now, though I think those people are renting hardware from Google in the end anyway

vertex is dead, for good reason too

It’s little to do with misinformation and much to do with trying to keep their model from collapsing from ingesting too much slop.

None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at?

My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.

Strongly disagree with that take. Kimi K3 is a distilled model. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, or to disparage the team behind it, but distilling and building on that is significantly easier and cheaper than building from the ground up.

And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.

More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.

Have you used Google search at all on the past few months? Every single search brings up a live chat prompt. They're serving fast AI to billions of users at huge scale everyday

And they're making money doing it.

Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?

Their live models have been and continue to be at the frontier. I like them a lot!

Uh, what? This is SOTA for a live model. What are you talking about?

It makes Meta look not that bad.

And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.