alt Hacker NewsIt's also very possible that they know their big model underperforms chatgpt 5.6 and fable by too much, so they are focusing on what they can get wins in like speed instead.
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That and/or the business case isn’t as clear when serving enormous models? You’re constantly stuck in a red queen’s race where your profitability window is increasingly measured in weeks because the Chinese are right behind you.
For small models (which are probably distilled from their big ones) you can serve them economically all the time and not hemorrhage money.
Yes agreed - I wrote this up a while back https://martinalderson.com/posts/whats-going-on-with-gemini/
My view then was they are optimising the models for inference ability on their own hardware AND use cases, which is often speed and time to first token.
They've somehow seemed to end up with terrible compute shortages, which again is surprising given how good Google is at infra deployments AND have their own hardware. From rumors out there they are turning down enterprise deals for Gemini because they don't have the compute.
The problem is they're falling further and further behind on frontier class on coding especially, and since I wrote that article it's got even worse with open weights models undercutting them on price AND intelligence.
There was some recent reporting that a July release of the Pro model got pushed back for exactly that reason. Its performance was not good compared to the OpenAI/Anthropic big models. They are having a lot of problems with posttrain.
This is the feeling i get too. Cant produce quality, but can produce something that is super fast...so take the wins where they are.
I personally doubt that.
It would be a shame if they cannot beat Kimi K3 or Qwen3.8 Max, both of which are claimed to be Fable-like. If that is true, it will be [or would be] the first time a major American lab falls behind a Chinese competitor.
> focusing on what they can get wins in like speed instead
Speed as a differentiator has always been Google's thing. They (used to?) show the microseconds it took to query & rank web-scale search results. Chrome, notoriously, focused on speed at the expense of resource use. The very many efforts to efficiently speed up Android & its runtime since its inception, and so on...
> their big model underperforms chatgpt 5.6
Possible but TFA claims:
We have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4 ...Didn't they already acknowledge this?
Paywalled article, but the headline is basically all you need: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/google-ge...
That's the only explanation that makes sense. If it was frontier but cost or compute were limiting factors, they'd release it at an obscene price for the bragging rights. Google doesn't care that much about alignment, and I don't think it's likely to be significantly different than 3.5 anyway. The only reason it would need to be soft-canceled is if it's terrible, and has to end up in a ditch like Llama 4 to avoid shareholder panic.