mchusma

It’s on openrouter. We just noticed performance was worse in a specific agentic app usecase. It’s possible we made an implementation mistake, my main point though is Google is really silly not hosting their own models.

Gemma 4 31b outperformed Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite in our app benchmarks (agentic tool use via api in our application as a part of various workflows). But google won't let you pay to use Gemma models, you have to go elsewhere, I think this may be because it would cannabilize Flash-lite.

I think its even more puzzling because you can't even run Gemma 31b on google cloud, they only let you test it with a rate limit. No way (I can find) to actually pay them to use it.

We saw great results in our usecase using google direct. Moved to Openrouter because google wouldn't let us use it beyond a test.

Then Openrouters performance looked worse, not sure if there was a quantized version or something. So we instead looked at Deepseek v4 Flash, and opted to go for that.

This model would probably be great for a super low cost cloud model, would love to use it in the cloud, Google makes you go elsewhere.

If we define product market fit as profitable with a trillion dollar valuation, I think the term has lost its helpfulness.

I do agree with the author that these companies seem much stronger financially recently though.

I can’t read the full article, but the snippet (6%gdp/$2T) seems not that expensive? And you could read that either way ”cheap so we should do it” or “if we end up needing to do it, we can do it”.

I am pretty convinced that friendly fraud is about 90% of chargebacks. I have seen some genuine fraud, but dwarfed by friendly fraud over time across 3 companies.

I think it does bear that out in general, although it is slightly more complicated. What seems to happen 1. Low-wage workers, as a collective group, experience an increase in earnings (Dube & Zipperer, 2024). 2. Total job losses do take place, but are minor and teens/part-time/new entrants workers lose more often (Belman & Wolfson, 2014; Redmond & McGuinness, 2024). 3. Lost hours & increased prices - businesses primarily absorb the cost by slightly reducing weekly hours worked & increasing prices for consumers (Redmond & McGuinness, 2024)

I would agree that modest minimum wage increases are far from the worst thing the government does, compared to other government interventions.

There are also home warranties or tech solutions/concierges like tidy.com.

The issue historically is that these concierge things are expensive (should be solved by tech/ai) and the warranties create their own class of problems (claim frustrations etc).

But home ownership is expensive, no way around it. But the work in coordinating etc doesn’t fundamentally need to be.

The poor have dramatically more children than the rich on average, you don't need to be rich to have kids. Kids don't need to have rich parents to have a good live/upbringing.

I have long wondered why these companies have only one model? Why not many models, letting the user choose? Why not let users tune what they want to see? It seems like a better user experience and safer from this type of (IMO valid) concerns. I’d want nothing to do with picking a users feed if I were them.

highly irritating. HIPAA was originally designed to be a "portability" standard (meaning easier to share). It has done the opposite. Health data is important to developing a cure, and privacy is unimportant to many people. The world would be better if there we were zero regulation here at all.

I actually do think token maxing is good, but they should have limited it per user. I find it reallly hard to get people to max out the Claude $100 plan, let alone the $200 plan. I understand the enterprise plans are different and more expensive, which is how you get these kinds of issues. But encouraging people to try things with AI is very important, and some amount of token maxing is importsnt.

Everything I read seems to suggest that RAM capacity is going to grow at 20-25% a year, which just doesn't seem good enough. Even in consumer use cases, phones and laptops would benefit greatly by double the amount of RAM. And then obviously, the AI need is gigantic.

I don't see it going away. I mean, it may not grow as fast as now, but I don't see it growing away either. I get why the memory makers do not want to bankrupt themselves, but it feels like there's got to be some way to push that risk off onto model providers and other people in the ecosystem to allow us to grow ram capacity more like 50% per year.

I don’t see any specific mention of Conductor, is this confirmed?

I just left the google I/O feeling less confident about google's execution here. - Gemini 3.5 flash is strange. Old cutoff, basically better than 3.1 pro at soem things worse at others, sometimes cheaper, sometimes more expensive than 3.1 pro. - Antigravity had seemed abandoned, and people speculated them cutting it off, and they kind of did migrating everyone to a new antigravity - Google "shipped the org chart" and they have so many AI products and none seem best of breed (e.g. the Gemini integration in google docs is worse than claude)

I was actually hoping for "Opus level intelligence at Haiku costs" model or "Sonnet level performance in Gemini 3.0 pricing", either of these would have been a workhorse, plus a competitor to Claude/Codex (1 app to do things). I got neither.

I've looked like a dozen places, I don't see anything. :(

I have thought about this and I think overall, this was a disappointing release from Google. I'm not sure the sentiment, but this feels like a miss.

What they did do in the keynote was spend a lot of time talking about their distribution advantage, and how they can own the consumer in search. But not a lot that will benefit partners or developers.

Basically, they released something broadly competitive with Sonnet 4.6, a new Omni model that seems interesting but unclear yet. They have completely ceded the frontier to OpenAI / Anthropic, and are saying "look for pro next month".

The best release since nano banana pro from Google has been Gemma.

Never mind, after looking at more benchmarks, seems closer to sonnet level intelligence at slightly lower cost. Speed is great for latency sensitive applications, but if this was 1/2 the cost it would have been priced to win.

If this is the big model release out of google, its a disappointent.

Okay, it's kind of somewhere between haiku and sonnet level pricing, at somewhere between sonnet and opus level performance. Its a great option. I was hoping to see opus class intelligence at haiku level pricing out of google, and this is close to that!

I think the original DeepSeek moment seemed important. And yes, the more recent model is good, but there are multiple. This commodification trend spans many different companies, including Kimi 2.5/2.6 and GLM5.1, and even Google itself with its Gemma models. There are a dozen models that exist at roughly the frontier from 6 months ago at 1/10th the cost.

Retatrutide is incredible in a mind altering way. I know 4 people on it, including myself. And all just love the way it makes you feel. You just don’t want to eat as much and you want to eat healthier. As far as I can tell, that is it. While I’m nervous there could be long term side effects, I think the health benefits of being at a healthy weight mean that for probably 50% of the developed world they would benefit from it.

Looking forward to more formal studies though!

I get this desire and commend the author, but I just want self driving cars and so I think we are just stuck with this.

I think this may be in fact a response to Starlink. Dead zones create opportunity for satellite direct to consumer plays, bypassing the big three. By teaming up around these fringe cases, you reduce that a bit.

It's funny that DocuSign was included here — small businesses really have no business using DocuSign. It's an enterprise product, it's expensive, and there are 20+ cheaper options out there.

eSignatures are probably in the top 10 at risk businesses right now. I did eSignatures before, and even I didn't buy a project just vibe coded the signature piece for a recent product.

I can't speak to their open source, but I really enjoy Bambu 3d printer and it works great for me and my 9 year old son.

What I will say is that this is probably the first model after gemini live to do some of these things. It feels similar to gemini live, which I don't think is what they were going for exactly, but IMO it is still impressive as I don't think anyone else has matched full duplex video/audio/tool calling.

Next gemini releases coming next week though, we will see how that matches up!

This paragraph is really odd: “As oppressive as it was, communism contributed by breaking down old social barriers and opening higher education to factory and farmworkers who had no chance before. A post-Communist boom in higher education means half of young people now have degrees.”

It feels like despite overwhelming evidence presented in the own article that communism was bad, they felt they had to say something vaguely nice about communism. But they can’t even keep it going for more than a sentence, because the next sentence says actually education was better after communism.

My father used to say "Nonprofit doesn't mean that nobody can make a profit". Seems applicable here.

I’ve looked at these auth providers many times over the years and I just don’t get the value. It takes me a couple of minutes to set up auth. Why would I want a dependency? It doesn’t help me with the hardest part which is configuring Google and Apple sign in stuff on Google and Apple. I just don’t get it.

I actually like the combined SpaceX / xAI as a hardware focused compute provider/infrastructure play.