Welcome to The Immersive Lens - the show where emerging tech meets creativity, education, and real-world impact. Hosted by Paul Engin (Professor of New Media) and Dave Ghidiu (Professor of Computer Science) at Finger Lakes Community College, this podcast dives into the technologies and creative innovations reshaping how we live, work, and learn - from AI and augmented reality to the future of media, design, and learning.

In this episode of The Immersive Lens, Paul, Dave, and Jeff tackle LLM benchmarking.

In this episode of The Immersive Lens, the crew dives deep into the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI by conducting a series of real-time benchmark tests on leading large language models, including Google Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Grok. The conversation kicks off with Dave sharing his deep-dive research methodology, which reveals how radically these tools differ when executing massive, multi-source literature syntheses. The team uses these insights to explore how foundational shifts in AI architecture are changing the way we interact with data, moving from simple text generation to proactive research agents.

As the episode progresses, Paul, Dave, and Jeff put these bots through their paces with a gauntlet of complex logic puzzles, strict negative constraints, and historically inaccurate prompts. The resulting performance gaps highlight the stark contrast between models that prioritize accuracy versus those that default to confident hallucinations. Ultimately, the team concludes that while AI capabilities are accelerating at breakneck speeds, users must remain highly critical of the output, as even the most advanced models still struggle with basic boundaries and truth-telling.

🔗 Links & Resources:

Claude Cowork by Anthropic - https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude-cowork

Codex is becoming a productivity tool for everyone - https://openai.com/index/codex-for-knowledge-work/

Introducing TRIBE v2 - https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundation-model/

NVIDIA DGX Spark - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/dgx-spark/

Perplexity Computer - https://www.perplexity.ai/personal-computer

Wikipedia: Gadsby (novel) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25B per month for compute - https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/

Mentions: @OpenAI @Google @AnthropicAI @X @Meta @Perplexity

FLX AI Hub: https://www.flcc.edu/ai/

FLCC New Media: https://newmedia.csc.flcc.cloud/

#LargeLanguageModels #ChatGPT #GoogleGemini #ClaudeAI #Grok #AIBenchmarks #TechHumor #SpatialReasoning #AIHallucinations #ChatbotShowdown #AI #EdTech #GenerativeAI #HigherEd #Podcast #FLCC #NewMedia #TechTrends #TechHistory #TheImmersiveLens

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Recorded at Finger Lakes Community College in the heart of New York’s Finger Lakes region.

https://www.flcc.edu/

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