Models are like programming, language languages. You don’t need to follow them. If you don’t do video stuff don’t worry about it. You could probably digest mode every month or two and be just fine.
Not really. 2 years ago that was a pretty normal amount of GPU hardware for a hacker or gamer. It's all relative. They are not accessible to most people yet, but for someone that cares and is a technologist? Likely accessible.
I would agree with you on AI/LLM being more than agentic coding but at the same time, I think there's more nuance.
For example, PDF's and powerpoints can be generated using agentic coding by things like https://bento.page or other ways of generating them in an agentic coding fashion.
A lot of browser automation could/is also done by agentic coding.
It can also help them set up and configure self hosted software with the help of LLM's and debugging if its working or not.
You can create videos using Manim and remotion.dev and also excalidraw-animate and generate excalidraw files agentically if what you need is more vector style graphics (which surprisingly can fit into many ideas) rather than say a real life human waving video/more photo-realistic video (but I must say that this has certainly its own pros/use-cases as well).
It might sound self-explainatory but turns out that coding can represent a wide range of problems!
I get that. I use agents a lot and LLMs often reason with code. It is valuable. I just think the floor is a lot lower for general reasoning and common tasks like that. And in 6-12 months it won’t matter. Google will publish better models. The temporal distortion of how long a Sol or a Fable has existed is real. No one is suddenly missing out on some giant competitive edge because their model is a few months behind. I feel like it’s all just going to normalize and things other than how well your model can write code will matter more and more in 12 to 24 months.
Sure I understand what you mean as well and I am not asking for SoTA models to be created by Google but more so explaining why coding is still the largest focus for many labs.
I personally wish to get more smaller models (like the recent qwen model) and other open source models like GLM 5.3 and the glm flash model.
> No one is suddenly missing out on some giant competitive edge because their model is a few months behind
Sure I can agree with that. The competitive edge might still exist but I do get the underlying sense of what you are trying to suggest.
> things other than how well your model can write code will matter more and more in 12 to 24 months.
What are the things then which you feel like could be more differentiative factor? For example, I personally think multi modal is still quite preferrable in AI models. I use GLM 5.2 and it doesn't have vision and I can certainly imagine time/use-cases where multi-modality would've helped coding and even other use cases as well. So what are some other use cases that you are thinking? Video generation models like Veo/Sora?
I work there. I have zero internal knowledge about the model. Opinion my own, etc. I don't think it is worth fighting to win on a month to month time horizon. When you step back and look an inch above this market, Gemini Pro 3.1 as a product was released in February. 6 months. It feels like forever and that Google is behind, but on a 2-3 year horizon? The models are going to stay similar.
Also, look at Flash 3.5 to 3.7. Flash 3.7 is a genuinely decent Sonnet 5 class model. Flash 3.7 is quite efficient too. Also, whatever was spent training 3.5 pro is probably not wasted. However, as a strategy, when I see models like Kimi K3, Fable, Sol. If you discard "because the model sucked" what other alternatives or potential options might exist?
I thought of a quite a few and they are far more compelling and interesting to me.
(Also Gemini models tend to be pretty decent at more than just programming. Enterprise AI use is more than just software eng / programming)
I'm the CTO of a GCP shop with an 8 figure annual commit.
If you'd told me at the end of Cloud Next 2025 that by now Google still wouldn't have a competitive offering to agentic coding offerings from Anthropic (Claude Code + Fable) or OpenAI (Codex + Sol), I wouldn't have believed you.
In our non-coding use cases where we're embedding models in our product, we're also not reaching for GCP stuff. Because Anthropic has the mindshare of our engineers and product folks, since it's what they use every day.
Given your position and the responsibility that comes with it; I sure hope you updated your mental model in another way than simply "they are acting irrational"... It's not clear from your comment that you did, but it sounded a bit like it.
I only like talking to Opus 4.6 in its default form. I have some pretty aggressive prompting strategies ensuring my language guidance rules are front and center and it really helps with Opus 4.8+, something went wrong with those models.
Also, OMP has a solid subagent model and I like it with some tweaking.
There is evidence that some forms of ADHD are effectively just the brain falling asleep rapidly and then waking up. This form cam be attenuated with norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor alone. Presents with ADHD like symptoms. But it’s a new thing most likely. Called “Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome”.
For the record, since I am on a mix of concerta and effexor, effexor alone does nothing to alleviate my symptoms (at the 150mg dosage). Although for me the adhd medication is no problem. It is actually effexor that torments me, because I have extreme withdrawal symptoms if I go even one day without it.
Effector is for dépression not ADHD. Do you get brain zap when you miss a dose ? Other medications don't have this problem, at least for many of not most people
Or maybe venlafaxine is to counteract any anxiety that the upper may cause. Well that's the theory my doctor had anyway. (I took venlafaxine with ADHD meds because of this)
Fear and anger are generally distinct emotions. You can have one without the other. Many of the same pathways are active with fear that are active with an anger in your mind, mechanically speaking. You can have anger without fear though.
I see a lot of people can conflict the two, but they are distinct as label labels and mechanical processes in the mind. Anger surfaces when there is someone to blame. Or something to blame. Something you can pin the emotional and surge on.
For your hypothesis above to be true, you generally need some sort of risk involved for fear to be the actual emotion. Anger can appear with zero fear and simply something blocking your way.
So I’m just not sure that I really agree on anger needing fear. There are plenty of situations where it doesn’t hold.
I was taught that fear is not just fear of personal harm.
The most destructive fear, is fear of not getting what I want. That is the fear that is most ubiquitous, and manifests in all sorts of destructive behavior.
Commented elsewhere, I still use Opus 4.6 because it is the only model that feels decent to interact with. 4.8 is decent and some times smarter but you can see it trending towards Opus 5 levels of nonsense. I use Opus 5 when I don't need to interact. Fable or Opus 4.6 are the only Anthropic models I like interacting with ATM.
I kind of still chill out on Opus 4.6 too. 4.8 is good too. I go between them. Opus 4.8 is a little smarter some of the time. Their use of language is both very different from Opus 5. Some of the time I have a hard time believing Opus 5 is even related to Opus 4.6 and 4.8.
I'm going to be sad when they retire 4.6. It's not my daily driver but it's still my go-to when the other models are being stupid in one way or another (either being too verbose, or lecturing me about how what I'm asking for is evil and bad).
That seems about right. 4.8 is like in between 4.6 and 5 in terms of capability and language and they are all pretty close honestly. I just default to using Opus 5 for a coding agent that I don't interact with and I like driving with Opus 4.6 or Fable. Fable thinks too much though. Fable is like that engineer on your team that will over-engineer the shit out of something if you let them. Fable was like, "Here are 34 yaks, which shall we shave first <hands rubbing together>" and I was like can't we just... write the script first and then decide of any of these poor yaks need shaving?
Can you give an example? It's a bit entertaining to read this given all the years long (and still ongoing) posturing about LLM sycophancy (not that all of these couldn't be true at the same time).
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