Anthropic legit builds one the strongest if not the strongest IC team in the history of computational technology. They are insanely stacked on talent, and either we will witness a legendary run, or a new LTCM
Their newest model wasn’t really SOTA. And honestly fable 5 was the most human like model I’d ever tried. It was an incredible jump.
And recently lots of Claude users at r/ClaudeAI are noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability. Not new things but maybe redirected compute. It just feels like one of the best models ever, maybe because the compute that was previously assigned to Fable has been redirected? It feels incredible.
They almost certainly wanted 3.5 Pro out for Google IO a few weeks ago. They're still crunching on it. No ETA given. Would be fascinating to read about the behind the scenes stories (failed training run?) if they ever get told.
Thank God. I'd rather companies ship something when engineers say it's actually ready rather than when the suits want something to show on stage to pump their egos and career exposure but turn out to be a massive disappointment covered in fluff.
The idea of "falling behind" when you can leapfrog each other every six months leads me to believe it has to be more than just "falling behind" for one cycle. It's a culture, process, red tape, focus, or mandate problem of some sort. Something not as easily correctable preparing for next launch.
>from the looks of it, 3.5 Flash is still better than most models
I guess it depends on what you're using it for. I think it's absolute garbage for coding and reasoning.
I use it almost daily as an alternative to google search and it's great for that, but for questions related to coding, solving arch linux and wine lutris issues, helping me with MXLinux issues, and wifi issues on an old rooted huawei tablet running LineageOS, it was consistently wrong, constantly giving out confident but outdated or misinformation, or hallucinating stuff while gaslighting me. Every time I would point out it was wrong, it would re-check and keep apologizing and then repeat giving me wrong answers, and then apologising again and so on. Same for asking it to write me a cover letter based on my resume and the job description I want to apply to. It massively sucked at that too and made up a bunch of fake sounding BS.
Basic free tier ChatGPT would blow it out of the water on all of those topics. Hell, even Grok free is better at that, it gave me a one-shot Arduino code that blew Gemini 3.5 flash away.
3.5 Flash seems tuned to just eyeballing basic answers to general purpose questions that resemble Google searches like "give me a recipe" or "give me a workout plan", or "when did Yandex move to Netherlands", not to solving complex issues that require cognition and accuracy. That's what the 3.1 Pro is better for. It doesn't matter what prompts or jailbreaks you give it to get 3.5 Flash to chew on complex problems for reasoning and better accuracy, it just defaults to being lazy and giving you the quick and easy answer from its weights.
I think Google just doesn't care about being the SOTA for coding, reasoning and accuracy, since they're in the ads and search business, not in the agentic coding business, so if the answers are some hallucinations that sound "good enough" to its clueless search user base, but is at least dirt cheap to run on their datacenter hardware, then it's already more than enough for them and they can all it a day.
Meanwhile OpenAI and Anthropic don't have search and ads monopolies, so they need to perform well at certain task for people to give them their hard earned money and survive as companies. For them, nailing stuff like coding and writing accuracy is an existential threat, not a hobby sideproject like it is for Google.
The thing about Gemini is that it never chews on a problem. Claude and GPT will regularly churn on a prompt for 10-15 minutes. I don't think I have ever seen Gemini think for more than a 2 minutes.
Google seems more interested in fast models that can quickly turn responses, which kind of fits with a company that needs to serve AI on a mass scale.
That was when they realized the deep learning was largely unnecessary, and they could just use their massive compute resources to brute force the problem space.
Proving that we would greatly benefit from using our compute resources for science rather than showing ads, and then we just kept showing ads.
Anthropic legit builds one the strongest if not the strongest IC team in the history of computational technology. They are insanely stacked on talent, and either we will witness a legendary run, or a new LTCM
Shazeer yesterday and Jumper today....Demis is there something we need to know about?
Something seems afoot at Google. The real tell will be if Demis makes a move. Jeff Dean seems more like a lifer to me.
Something spicy must have happened internally at Google. This rapid fire high level attrition isn't just down to the bureaucratic quagmire.
Is it possible they are just falling behind ?
Their newest model wasn’t really SOTA. And honestly fable 5 was the most human like model I’d ever tried. It was an incredible jump.
And recently lots of Claude users at r/ClaudeAI are noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability. Not new things but maybe redirected compute. It just feels like one of the best models ever, maybe because the compute that was previously assigned to Fable has been redirected? It feels incredible.
They almost certainly wanted 3.5 Pro out for Google IO a few weeks ago. They're still crunching on it. No ETA given. Would be fascinating to read about the behind the scenes stories (failed training run?) if they ever get told.
> They're still crunching on it. No ETA given.
Thank God. I'd rather companies ship something when engineers say it's actually ready rather than when the suits want something to show on stage to pump their egos and career exposure but turn out to be a massive disappointment covered in fluff.
> noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability
I've definitely noticed it, at least for doing backend C#/dotnet. Its insanely good, I haven't had to babysit much at all this week.
from the looks of it, 3.5 Flash is still better than most models
https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/glm-5-2-is-the-new-le...
The idea of "falling behind" when you can leapfrog each other every six months leads me to believe it has to be more than just "falling behind" for one cycle. It's a culture, process, red tape, focus, or mandate problem of some sort. Something not as easily correctable preparing for next launch.
>from the looks of it, 3.5 Flash is still better than most models
I guess it depends on what you're using it for. I think it's absolute garbage for coding and reasoning.
I use it almost daily as an alternative to google search and it's great for that, but for questions related to coding, solving arch linux and wine lutris issues, helping me with MXLinux issues, and wifi issues on an old rooted huawei tablet running LineageOS, it was consistently wrong, constantly giving out confident but outdated or misinformation, or hallucinating stuff while gaslighting me. Every time I would point out it was wrong, it would re-check and keep apologizing and then repeat giving me wrong answers, and then apologising again and so on. Same for asking it to write me a cover letter based on my resume and the job description I want to apply to. It massively sucked at that too and made up a bunch of fake sounding BS.
Basic free tier ChatGPT would blow it out of the water on all of those topics. Hell, even Grok free is better at that, it gave me a one-shot Arduino code that blew Gemini 3.5 flash away.
3.5 Flash seems tuned to just eyeballing basic answers to general purpose questions that resemble Google searches like "give me a recipe" or "give me a workout plan", or "when did Yandex move to Netherlands", not to solving complex issues that require cognition and accuracy. That's what the 3.1 Pro is better for. It doesn't matter what prompts or jailbreaks you give it to get 3.5 Flash to chew on complex problems for reasoning and better accuracy, it just defaults to being lazy and giving you the quick and easy answer from its weights.
I think Google just doesn't care about being the SOTA for coding, reasoning and accuracy, since they're in the ads and search business, not in the agentic coding business, so if the answers are some hallucinations that sound "good enough" to its clueless search user base, but is at least dirt cheap to run on their datacenter hardware, then it's already more than enough for them and they can all it a day.
Meanwhile OpenAI and Anthropic don't have search and ads monopolies, so they need to perform well at certain task for people to give them their hard earned money and survive as companies. For them, nailing stuff like coding and writing accuracy is an existential threat, not a hobby sideproject like it is for Google.
The thing about Gemini is that it never chews on a problem. Claude and GPT will regularly churn on a prompt for 10-15 minutes. I don't think I have ever seen Gemini think for more than a 2 minutes.
Google seems more interested in fast models that can quickly turn responses, which kind of fits with a company that needs to serve AI on a mass scale.
Gemini is super bad, grok is actually superior most of the time and that's saying something because grok also sucks.
The level of competition and back-stabbing within the Google pre-training team has reached a level only seen in financial trading.
If Anthropic has been able to protect itself against that, even partially, they have an edge.
Maybe because they know where things are going with Gemini (more ads to your face) while Anthropic might, for once, have a different story.
When personal finance is not the bottleneck anymore, the new criteria becomes "vision" and "stacked talent".
Vesting schedule?
Name checks out.
Missed opportunity for headline: John jumper jumps to anthropic
John Jumper Makes The Leap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Jumper
So Mr. Jumper. You are committed? We need people longer term here. Your boss Mr. Settles is really excited about you joining.
Super Mario leaves Nintendo to focus on plumbing.
Two big names left GDM recently. Could be a coincidence, but where's the fun in that? :p
you mean shazeer?
The guy who invented jumping is joining a major AI lab?!?
John Jumper what a great name sounds like a video game action hero.
Who?
He was leading the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that predicts protein structures for which he got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
I remember that.
That was when they realized the deep learning was largely unnecessary, and they could just use their massive compute resources to brute force the problem space.
Proving that we would greatly benefit from using our compute resources for science rather than showing ads, and then we just kept showing ads.
You could argue that training SOTA LLMs is pre-bruteforcing every problem everywhere all at once.
AlphaFold is based on deep learning and it's not brute force.