very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.
It's ridiculously fast, and generally very good with real-world knowledge. It's my go-to for anything non-coding, and for quick fixes/questions/prototypes.
If metrics measured what most people need from an LLM, it's competitive, IMO, and with their TPU chips, it's probably economically competitive.
Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
