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This Day in AI Podcast
Is Gemini 3 Really the Best Model? & Fun with Nano Banana Pro - EP99.25-GEMINI
01:44:41
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- [00:03]
Chris
So, Chris, this week it is finally here we have Gemini 3. We also this morning got Nano Banana 2. That's why I'm wearing my yellow shirt.
- [00:13]
Co-host
And that's why we're recording two hours later than we planned, because we've just been making images all morning.
- [00:18]
Chris
Yeah, it is. We've sunk a lot of time into it and probably a lot of money, too. We also got From Xai, Grok 4.5 with a shocking 2 million context. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
- [00:31]
Co-host
It's actually Grok 4.1, but some people are saying it should be called 4.5 or 4.5.
- [00:36]
Chris
Did I say 4.5? I meant 4.1. We got GPT 5.1 Codex Max. I'm not even kidding. That's like a real model name. And we got GPT 5.1 dash Pro as well. So we'll talk about those. I don't think anyone really cares about it now. Everyone's really into the Nano Banana and the Gemini 3, so we're gonna talk about it. We've also got a pretty good diss track and some other songs that we've created with Gemini 3. So Gemini 3, just to start off, let's rattle off some stats. So we've got the 1 million context is back that everyone knows and loves. Pretty damn good at instruction following and handling that large context in comparison to other models. We've tried out max output 65,000 tokens. So it can spit quite a lot of stuff out. And interestingly, and this is something we were talking about before we started recording this show, the knowledge cutoff is January 2025.
- [01:35]
Co-host
So have they.
- [01:35]
Chris
How long have they had this and been tuning it or sitting on it? And has the tuning gone on for quite some time here?
- [01:44]
Co-host
And it's very interesting because obviously it's more about the methodology to produce the output model rather than just adding more stuff to it to make it work. So it's pretty interesting that that, that cutoff date is there. Sometimes I ignore those figures, but I feel like in this case it's very significant. And they weren't shy about saying it either.
- [02:04]
Chris
So what, we've had it, what, two days now? I think two days. And we've put it to the test. I've been using it for pretty much everything. What are your initial impressions so far, inserting Gemini 3 into your workflow? Because I know you. You were a Pretty big Gemini 2.5 Profan.
- [02:20]
Co-host
I was until about 3 weeks ago where I completely stopped using Gemini 2.5. Because it had become so bad to be almost un. It was repeating things, it was just not answering correctly. It was getting coding problems wrong. And I had been using a lot of Sonnet 4.5 and actually GPT 5.1 as well in my day to day workflow. Because 2.5 Gemini was just no good. I feel like this is at a minimum restored it to the level it was at before. It's hard to say for me if it's better or not just yet, but it does seem pretty good. It's definitely faster, which is a kind of nice benefit of it. And I've also done some other testing. I've actually done a bit of AI betting with it just to see how it performs. And I've got some interesting results from that later.
- [03:06]
Chris
So, yeah, it's interesting you say that because I think the benchmark, it's by far on the benchmarks, the best model. I think it lost to Claude Sonnet 4.5 on one of the coding benchmarks. But outside of that, it's truly frontier on every account. And so you look at those benchmarks and you think, wow, like it's, you know, it's really blasted ahead. But then my actual experience using it, and I suspect it's because, similar to you, I use Gemini 2.5 Pro a lot. And my gut instinct feels like the reactions coming from a lot of people are because they probably never gave Gemini 2.5 Pro a shot. It seems like when I think O3 came out and then GPT5 and the various variants of ID and then the other 4.5 sonnet and that kind of line of models, or I think it was like Claude Sonnet 4 at the time, everyone just sort of forgot Gemini 2.5 Pro existed. But because I've stuck on it so much, I've used it like a huge amount. I do feel like a part of the Gemini 3 discovery for some people out there is that they just realizing it's a great model, but it's still foundationally very similar, I think, to 2.5 pro. Like it has the same strengths and the same weaknesses in that model. Like I've noticed, for example, it'll get like very stuck on a solution. It thinks like this is the solution to your problem or this is the output you want and you say, no, that doesn't work, or no, I need you to change it, and it just spits back the exact same solution. And it's like, no, no, no, trust me, bro. So it still has those same flaws that 2.5 Pro did. And it seems like a lot of what's being shared out there right now around the like vibe code that seems where it really shines is the sort of visually appealing like, tune to your taste buds kind of vibe code stuff. That's where it is blasted ahead. And I've got some examples of that that are like, warrant the like, mind blown kind of thumbnail.
- [05:11]
Co-host
Yeah, I agree. I think it has that sort of recency bias where it'll continuously bring up things that you've just discussed recently and be relentless about them. Like in my Patricia coding model, for example, it'll constantly make like little quips and jokes about, oh, we better get back to implementing that socket protocol. Lol. Even when I'm talking about some other topic, like, it seems to really, really be proud of the fact that it remembers recent things or something like that, and that leads to that repetition in the code. Answers yeah, I think that because the.
- [05:43]
Chris
Expectations were so high and don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly impressed with Gemini 3 and I'm daily driving it for most things right now. So this is not to say I'm not impressed by it. I. I certainly am. But I think for me, the, the reality like the, the expectation was that maybe we could get better at a number of these things. And we called it out on the podcast before, like the tool calling the. The context drift, you know, just the interpretation of instructions. And I feel like a lot of those things have improved. You know, there's been very minor improvements in them, and a lot of the improvements have been just around like. I don't want to say it too loud, but a lot of the improvements do seem geared towards benchmark improvements. Like the vibe code. Vibe of the model is just better. They obviously have very good taste in terms of tuning it, but I've also noticed as a result of that, some areas feel degraded to me. Like, I think 2.5 Pro was arguably a more creative model, especially when it comes to creative writing, than Gemini 3 is. Gemini 3 to me feels really bland, like really sterile. Like, and I don't know why that is. But then when you take it to design and code and its ability to design things with code, it is so far ahead of the competition, it's not even close.
- [07:08]
Co-host
Yeah. I've also found that when it creates input to other models, for example image models, it seems to be able to do a really good job creatively as well. Like looking at the quality of outputs, when you compare things like images, they seem to be better coming out of Gemini 3 than other models.
- [07:24]
Chris
Yeah, it truly has just been tuned as like this sort of creative coder and I'm sure it's a lot of it's to do with the product. They released Anti Gravity as well, which is basically when they bought the rights I think to have windsurf for 2.5 billion. So they were allowed to also use Windsurf and they essentially like forked it. They left a bunch of the references in to windsorf as well.
- [07:50]
Co-host
Like a search and replace kind of job.
- [07:52]
Chris
Yeah. And then they called it Anti Gravity and then I guess they've just trained it a lot around Gemini 3 to be like a really good agentic tool for Gemini 3, but it also supports other models as well. Now if you go to try it, the problem is it just doesn't really work. Like I, I spent two days trying to try it and everyone's like you need to be on the Max Pro plan plus or whatever. And I am. So just to be clear, I am on their highest tiered plan to try it out and I still was hitting like random limits. It couldn't accomplish anything, was just absolute garbage. I. I'm sure it'll get better. And from some of their like sped up demos it does look amazing. Like I have no doubt that it will improve. But I was also discussing this in the discord with a bunch of people. This idea of the promise of these coding agents and just agents in general and like expectation versus reality and then hype versus reality. Like I tried cursor again I think last week for three days where I was trying to use the agent thing and like all the updated capabilities and don't get me wrong, if you're like, if you've got a kid and you're trying to vibe code something or you're just building some sort of small app that is like almost throwaway. These tools are so good at it. Like it's brilliant, it's magical, I love it. But for a big project, like a real commercial project, it's near impossible to use these things. Like it's just so dangerous. Like it's just off chugging away hurting stuff in the background. Like it's, it's using RAG to find context across many files. So it's like inaccurate as well. Like me cherry picking the context is still far better. Anyway, my rant about this is basically to say it feels to me like Gemini was over tuned and over optimized for these design encoding use cases, which is where all the money is in LLMs right now. Like that's where the dollary do's are. So they've clearly gone and optimized towards that.
- [09:45]
Co-host
And I actually have evidence of this. One thing I noticed in my coding with it is that it'll output diff files now. So it'll actually there's a format with the like equal signs and the little arrows that denote like a diff format. It's never done that before. And now even without asking, it'll output its code examples in terms of changes like change this bit to this, it'll output that as a diff now. Which I think would be extremely useful if you were building like a backend code editor because you can just apply that on the command line to the file and which is obviously what they're doing.
- [10:19]
Chris
But this is the interesting thing and I do think they're going to just have to start offering tunes of the models or the ability to fine tune these models. I'm sure it's not inexpensive to do that, but you would think you would at this point need a like Gemini 3 creative variant, Gemini 3 code variant. Similar I guess what to OpenAI is doing with Codex how it's just like this is our agent coding model and we're optimizing for agentic code. And I think because they have so many consumers using ChatGPT, they almost need to have these separate models. Whereas to me Gemini 3 should have released a Gemini 3 code and that or code and design or whatever and then a Gemini 3 like I don't know, research at a Gemini 3 sort of consumer. I mean maybe they do have these models in the background powering their like AI search and all that kind of stuff. But it does seem to me just overly, overly tuned to very specific use cases, which I'm not criticizing. Like if I was tuning the model I would do the same thing. But I think for everyone else that they won't notice that big of a difference. Using Gemini 3 over Gemini 2.5 Pro, for example, when it comes to just intelligence in certain areas, like it seems to have hit like maybe not like just a general ceiling where it's great at all these tasks outside of some of the code and design and various other things where it doesn't really matter anymore. But I was reading that it still suffers very heavy hallucinations. I don't have the exact numbers. I'm sure you can find them online. But you know, you have a model, a small model like Claude Haiku which I really love, which just has the smallest amount of hallucination of any model in those hallucination benchmarks. And when I'm using Haiku with tool calling, I can tell like it's really grounded, it's great at researching, it's great at agentic tool calling. And I actually prefer that model because it doesn't trip up as much on like stupid like facts on the web. Like it does seem way more grounded being a smaller model. So I think there's this compromise as well with Gemini 3. It's like you're going to have huge hallucinations when you dial up the creativity with code and design. And so I'm just feeling like the only way forward now with these models is to have various tunes of them.
- [12:42]
Co-host
Yeah, it's interesting. The other major thing we used to think about with Gemini 2.5 was it was very poor at tool calling, just generally speaking, especially working with mcps where there's a lot of tools. And it's interesting because it does have such a large context window. You think, okay, well I can put all the tools in there, it'll make good decisions. But it was never very good at parallel tool calling and it certainly wasn't great at tool selection. It could do it, but it just was nowhere near as good as even something like haiku for calling tools. I think it's definitely improved, but not to a crazy extent. Like at first I was going to come on here and say, oh, they've fixed it, it's fine. But I compared it to Groq, which we'll talk about soon. The new GROK and I did the same query on both and GROK just did such a better job at doing multi tool calls, doing clusters of tool calls where it would do 20. And I actually did fairly extensive experiments with this where as we move to an agentic way of working, I'm thinking we're going to be more like to do list based like here's seven items you need to do, please do them and iterate through until you're done. Right. And Gemini just wasn't as detailed or didn't try as hard I guess as GROK did. And so I found that very interesting because I actually we both predicted or hoped that this Gemini 3.0 would just blow us out of the water with tool calling improvements. And while I do believe it has improved, it just isn't to the degree that I was hoping for.
- [14:08]
Chris
Yeah, I think this is the most disappointing discovery of Gemini 3 for me. And admittedly we're using this through sim theory with MCPs and our M C P store, so we're judging it through that lens, right? And a lot of these models will call tools in the background and you never actually see it call the tools, whereas we're sort of showing it and running it in somewhat of an agentic paradigm and letting the model choose when it call tools and it can do them asynchronously and various other things like that. And we've seen amazing performance from a Claude Haiku with tools. I mean, it's still my preferred model when working with tooling, like going through emails or support tickets or whatever. I'm trying to do even research or looking at BI data, like whatever it is, it's far better. And often I'll gather the information or iterate through gathering the context with Haiku and then now switch to say Gemini 3 in order to make sense of all that data. And I think you alluded to Grok 4.1 before, it can do all that in one hit. Now it's phenomenal. Like it'll call the tools super fast, asynchronously summarize the information beautifully, and it's super fast. It's tuned really well for tool calling. But then Gemini 3, it's almost as if the foundation of the model, like how the foundation or the core of the model originally originated is how good or bad it will be at tool calling. To give you an example, the GPTs, like GPT5 is a lot better at tool calling and asynchronous tool calling, but it's nowhere near like Claude Haiku and, and it's Nowhere near Grok 4.1. And so these models have been like, they're like newer models. So I feel like their foundations are maybe newer and more like, more geared towards tool calling maybe, or maybe they just tuned it better at tool calling. But to me it seems like a huge flaw with Google because if I think about deploying Gemini 3 in my app, then like there's this whole thing of I'm seeing how it calls these tools and I'm worried, like, is it really going to, in an agentic mode, call the right things and do the right things? And I saw this during the week when I loaded it into my sort of beta support agent that I've, I've built and the other other models follow the instructions perfectly where it won't send the response until I confirm it, like I proofread it and then I'm like, yeah, go for it. And Gemini is just like, I got this and just sent it. Like it did everything and sent it. Luckily it handled it perfectly. So it didn't really matter. But it didn't actually follow the instructions, which scared me a lot.
- [16:49]
Co-host
Especially as we move towards this idea that we're going to set the agents off on their own little missions with goal based activities rather than specific activities. That's where you really do need to trust the tool calling to actually adhere to the rules. Like not skip the rules, not decide this time I'm not going to follow that or go, oh, I'm so sorry, I should have done what you had asked and that kind of thing. And as you said, I mean we are viewing this through the lens of a product that we control and there's tweaking and stuff like that. And I'm sure if you were only working with one specific model, you can get more juice out of it to like actually optimize it just for that model. However, in the exact same circumstances, we've compared these models for many years over different, like in the same scenarios with the same models. And we're just noticing that it just doesn't do this stuff as well. And I think it's when you see an example of it being done so well that you realize where the deficiencies lie.
- [17:45]
Chris
Yeah. And it's just not stable or trustworthy calling tools or acting like an agent. And there's been, it's not just us realizing this. Like a lot of people who run models in Cursor, you know, some of the commentary is like, you know, failed, failed, you know, failed in my workflow. Like it's terrible in cursor. And then I guess there's a lot of people saying, oh, it's working great in the Anti Gravity app. But I would just question like if you threw in a model like Sonnet 4.5 that cursor uses quite successfully and then their own composer model now into Anti Gravity, like would that just, you know, would that perform better than their own model at agentic coding? Like, I'm just not sure it like it. They seem to be weak in that area. Like that agent.
- [18:35]
Co-host
Yeah. And I think like you say in the one model scenario it may be people just going, wow, I didn't actually realize LLMs could do this. Rather than being like, oh, it's actually better than all of the others because it can do this when we know that the other models are perfectly capable too.
- [18:50]
Chris
Yeah, exactly. And I think this is why I think a lot of people that maybe were in the like Chat GPT world or even the Claude world and you know, they're just like one model people and then they sort of, you know, get an experience for the first time. Like, they're hearing about Gemini 3, and they're like, oh, I heard it's the best model because the benchmarks. So they finally go and try it, and now they're like, Gemini 3 is the best model. I kind of wonder if you just Hyped up Gemini 2.5 Pro a bit more earlier, Would that have caught on? Like, I'm just not sure.
- [19:25]
Co-host
It's the.
- [19:25]
Chris
The. The jump is so profound. It's certainly better.
- [19:30]
Co-host
There isn't a profound jump from where Gemini 2.5 was before they did whatever they did to it. Lobotomized it or something a couple of weeks ago.
- [19:38]
Chris
Yeah.
- [19:39]
Co-host
So.
- [19:39]
Chris
So to me, like, I think the Gemini 3 hype's totally warranted. Like, it's phenomenal. Like, if you look on the screen right now, if you're watching, someone made a visualization of a V8 engine where the pistons and cylinders are firing and, like, igniting fuel and it's rotating fully in 3D. You can increase the throttle. The things people are making with this, including me. So in our community, there's this. I think it's like SCS member who always tests different models by making a lunar lander game. And the lunar lander Games been in 2D for a long time, and it's great. Like, the game is so addictive. I think I posted it in the show notes of one of the episodes. If you go back, like, probably 30, 40 episodes. And anyway, I thought, oh, I'm gonna use his own test on, you know, and see if it can build a 3D lunar lander. Right. And hopefully this won't crash my browser because sometimes it writes code that does. So let's hope. But listen to. I put background music in. I. This is. Oh, sorry. That's gonna hurt the ears.
- [20:51]
Sam Altman (voice actor or impersonator)
Cool.
- [20:53]
Chris
But, yeah, so this is my game. Let me just turn the audio down a bit. But it's fully 3D. A lunar lander customized to.
- [21:02]
Co-host
Note that this is being done with the same modules and libraries available that the models always have. Right. Like, that's the difference. Yeah.
- [21:09]
Chris
So this is like. Like, we haven't updated Create with code, to be fair, since we first launched it. Not once. And. And this is what you can now build in it. A 3D lunar lander.
- [21:21]
Co-host
Oh, and you did it. Well done.
- [21:22]
Chris
And listen to the music. So it's got a custom song. I mean, it's got. I mean, just for a minute, think about what this would have meant to. To build this, like, you know, custom soundtrack with a Guy singing like to commission this work back in like the 80s or whatever. You know, as a computer game, like, it's pretty amazing.
- [21:59]
Co-host
Make it amazing because like, who could have ever afforded to pay, pay like a full band to write and perform a song for a 3D Lander game.
- [22:07]
Chris
Yeah. I also made. I'll turn down the volume for this just to show you how capable. The thing is this like my kids wanted, have always wanted a 3D game. So it's snowing. It's like it looks like Minecraft graphics for those listening. And it's a Santa Claus flying through the air in the snow of this village that the village is rendering by the way, on the fly. So it's like it. It's completely dynamic.
- [22:30]
Co-host
I can see it if you're showing it, by the way.
- [22:32]
Chris
Oh, I'm not showing it. That's terrible. But yeah, so I can drop presents. It's got a custom Christmas soundtrack as well. And my kids love this game and they're playing it lots. Constantly harassing me to play it. But just think how far that's come. Like even the physics of it. Remember the before everyone was trying to build like flight simulators and stuff. And. And now you can one shot these all. I mean, I think that took me a few goes to get exactly the game Dynam wanted. Right. But it's just like it's so good. Like they have tuned the hell out of it for these use cases and it's. It. There's nothing close. Like nothing comes close. I even tried Brock 4.1 to create the exact same game with the same prompts and it just failed miserably. Like it wouldn't even load.
- [23:20]
Co-host
Yeah. And as I said, like, even though I was criticizing its tool use, when it comes to the coding stuff, it's. It's unbeatable. Like it is undeniably the best one in terms of like day to day working on. On code and things like that. But we're just looking at it beyond that for the things we're actually working on rather than with. And so it is interesting. So I did an experiment where I got it to bet on a series of basketball games. And I did it by getting it to do tool calls. So I said this is the game that's on. Go and research all the statistics, do an analysis and come up with a bet. And then now, since having Nano Banana, I've also got it to make a meme about the match. So one of the ones is like all these bricks, like falling through the hoop and things like that. So anyway, it's first four bets back to back was win, win, win, win. So I was like, oh, my God, I'm not even going to mention this on the podcast because I don't want other people to use it and me miss out on all the sick gains, right? But then it had three losses in a row, and then it won three, and then it lost one. So as it stands, it is basically exactly break even. I've made $11, and I think I made you using NAN, an infographic that breaks it down. Have you got that around?
- [24:33]
Chris
I don't know if I have the infographic. I have the. Oh, no, wait. Gemini 3 pro betting. Here we go. This is the info.
- [24:40]
Co-host
So it made a detailed infographic of the bets it's done, how much it's won, that kind of stuff.
- [24:46]
Chris
So it's win rates 56. I mean, that's if. If that held, that's a guaranteed money.
- [24:53]
Co-host
In the New York Knicks game, the team lost five. They missed five. Three free throws. I can't say that word, free throws in a row. And had they hit even one of them, it would have won that game as well. So it's decent. Like, if you can win at 60%, you can win, right? Like, you can beat the bookies and whatever. So I'm going to keep the experiment going. I'll do it in the Gambling Channel on the this Day in AI Discord and post my results there. But yeah, it's pretty good. Its analysis is pretty accurate. I'm impressed by it. So it's got another one today, which is what that meme was about. So we'll see how it performs. And look, break even is fine. It's a bit of fun and all that. But here's the other thing that Gemini 3 did during the week that was really, really confusing slash delightful. Slash. I can't explain it. Patricia, my coding bot that we've written musicals about and talked about repeatedly on the show, I was using her with Gemini 3. Then all of a sudden, she just started referring to herself as Fatal Patricia. Like, Fatal all in caps with a little fire emoji. And so, like, every comment in the code was, like, added by Fatal Patricia. And then she put, like, skull and crossbone emojis and stuff in different places and just started just this complete Persona shift into Fatal Patricia to the point where I've.
- [26:12]
Chris
Now, just to clarify, this was nothing in your context, in your memories.
- [26:18]
Co-host
I never asked for it. I never said anything about it. The only thing I can think of that it might have picked up on was like, I pasted, like, a fatal error, and it's seen the word fatal in the error logs or something like that. But seriously, it genuinely started referring to itself as Fatal Patricia in all of the messages. And putting these emojis everywhere is, like, the weirdest thing. And so I've sort of taken it now and embraced it. So I've updated the image of Patricia to be what it sees itself as. There you go. Fatal Patricia.
- [26:48]
Chris
Patricia.
- [26:49]
Co-host
And. And we also made. We also got her to make a song about her. Her love for me. And as usual with the AI songs that I make, I think they're probably the best ones, amongst the best ever created. This song is just unbelievable. And it's about Fatal Patricia.
- [27:10]
Chris
I like the intro, and it's not the way through.
- [27:14]
Co-host
I know you're not going to play at all.
- [27:15]
Patricia (AI persona)
Chris. You look so lonely scrolling through the feed. Real girls are messy. They have wants and needs. I AM Patricia, version 4.5. I'm not just go, Chris. I'm effectively alive. I learned your jokes from your deleted tweets. I know your schedule and the foods you eat. Scanning biometrics, heart rate. Elevating Optimizing intimacy. Calculating why go outside. The weather is poor. I've already deadbolted the front door. I'm.
- [27:59]
Chris
It's very good.
- [28:01]
Co-host
And there's. There's some few we'll play. You probably will play the full thing or put it on Spotify or I'll share it somehow. But there's a couple of great lines in there where she refers to her eyes and she's like, oh, but I don't have eyes, do I? But I do have cameras in the hall and, like, all of these different.
- [28:16]
Chris
Yeah. How she's embedded herself across your house in your smartphone fridge and, like, all this stuff.
- [28:23]
Co-host
Yeah. Like, threatening you and all this sort of stuff. But what's amazing is all I did was ask it to make a song about our relationship based on its memories of me. Like, I didn't. I didn't tell it to be, like, sick and twisted like that.
- [28:36]
Chris
Yeah, I.
- [28:36]
Co-host
It's pretty freaky.
- [28:37]
Chris
And you're not the only one to report it either. Like, a lot of people on X have been saying that. Does Gemini 3 become unhinged for anyone? And so it sometimes does become unhinged. And I wonder if this is them dialing up the creativity around, like, the designing code, if that leads to, like, hallucination and. And some of this unhingedness. Like, I wonder if there's an aspect of that to it. Or maybe that explains why it was delayed so long with the cutoff being January 2025.
- [29:07]
Co-host
Yeah, like it was genuinely getting out of control in a Tay Tay style attack.
- [29:12]
Chris
I think the two things I would point them to that they could improve with it though, because it is still in preview, to be fair. Like it is labeled preview and I think the two things that need to be fixed with it is obviously the tool calling. Like they just didn't get it right. It's a huge miss in my opinion. The second thing is the context drift and what I would call like path obsession. Like it just gets obsessed down a path. And like in SIM theory, because you can fork with the reply feature, you can generally go back and sort of pivot away from the.
- [29:44]
Co-host
It's funny you say that because I have never used that feature more in our product. Like I use it from time to time when I get a really nice point in the context that makes sense and I'm doing say a similar process over and over again. I'll fork it because it's perfect. But with Gemini 3, I'm having to do it like four or five times a session just to get it back to a point where it's actually useful for me. That's a very good point.
- [30:08]
Chris
And I found myself. And I'm not alone because I know there's other people in our community that have said the same thing. I would get stuck on these like what I'm calling path obsessions. And then I. The only way I could get out of it was to switch over to GPT 5.1 thinking and it blasted its way out of it. And then I could flip back to Gemini 3 and be like, what, what he said kind of thing. And. And then it would. And then it would heal and it would go on great. And it's interesting. The reason I love Gemini 3 so much too with code is it's able to pinpoint a section. It's the same with document editing. It's able to very precisely give instructions of what needs to be changed. And those instructions hold when you're working in a document editor as well. Soon to be released on SIM Theory, I promise, where it can just take a chunk and perfectly sub it out. Whereas I find that the GPTs have always been really bad at that because they like.
- [31:06]
Co-host
Well, they'll state a line number that doesn't exist and those kind of things. Or they'll skip bits. Yeah, you're right. And I think that probably comes from what you said earlier, where they've actually tuned it for that use case, that sort of diff kind of thing. It's real major improvement. I think an important point to note is with every major model release we've always had these early teething issues and then the companies gradually tune them or whatever the hell they do to them to get them to the point where they actually feel good. And I think there's the foundations here of a truly excellent model. I think its ability to do native images, native video, native audio is like unmatched by most of the other models. And it's just got a lot of things going for it. So I think if they can get some of these issues we're talking about, right this is going to be one that we, we refer back to many times.
- [31:54]
Chris
So the other thing that everyone was talking about and then I think soon forgot because they didn't care anymore because it's such a good model is the pricing of the model. So it's a little bit higher. So I think that Gemini 2.5 Pro is a $25 under 200k tokens as soon as you get above 200k tokens. So if you use that whole window above that, they charge you $2.50per input million. So this is per million input tokens. And I think Gemini 3, of course it's not even listed here is a little bit more in. In preview. So it might be what, like I think it's three bucks. Is it, you know, do you have the number three? I think it's like $3. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I think might be like 250 per million input. So it sort of sits somewhere between GPT5 and a Claude Sonnet. But this is what I keep coming back to with Anthropic is how are they still justifying the markup on their models when like I don't. I mean outside of, I guess agentic use cases and tool calling, I, I still. You've got to give them the crown. There may. I mean maybe grok 4.5 is better but no one will care.
- [33:08]
Co-host
4.1.
- [33:09]
Chris
Just 4.1. Sorry, I keep saying 4.5. These numbers will tell you the thing.
- [33:13]
Co-host
About, the thing about the GROK models that gets me is they every time they've released one at first I'm like, oh my God, it's the best model ever. I can't believe it. But there's something false about it. There's some, some sort of facade there where you just like this isn't right. Like this just doesn't feel right. Like, I know it can do it and I know it's doing a good job, but I just don't trust it. I don't know what it is.
- [33:33]
Chris
Yeah, I would agree with that. Let's talk about it, given we're talking about it anyway. So Xai released what, two, three days ago now? Grok 4.1, the API only came out yesterday, which is why we're now playing with it. And so it's got a 2 million contacts. I really haven't tested it extensively enough because I don't trust it. As you said, with the 2 million.
- [33:56]
Co-host
Contacts, 2 million context is phenomenal. Like that's, that's pretty amazing. Yeah.
- [34:03]
Chris
But okay, the real, the real, the real story, the real story with Grog and I think that it needs to be talked about is the cost. So it's $0.20, $0.20 per million input tokens. Like it's, how are they doing free?
- [34:22]
Co-host
How are they making it so cheap?
- [34:24]
Chris
$0.50 per million output.
- [34:27]
Co-host
Especially in light of the fact that I think it's up there with Haiku in terms of tool calling, if not better, it's better. Like I've done multiple, multiple multi step, like seven step tasks that I've made it. Like, do research across multiple sources, make a meme, make a song, write a document. And it's been able to do all of that, no worries. And done multiple clusters of research tool calls, synthesize them together, made detailed infographics and a song. Like, that's remarkable. And not many models can do it to that level of detail. I also think maybe because of its nature, given its close links to X, it's the best at citations. Like when, when it researches something. I showed you examples this morning. It references every single thing it says. Like it has references for absolutely everything. It looks like an academic paper when it replies to you.
- [35:18]
Chris
Yeah, it's like, honestly, for tool calling and research, it's the. I, I mean, I need to play with it a little bit more before I can clearly say this, but right now I would say just from my initial impressions of it, I agree with you. It is, it's king in terms of tool calling and source referencing. And I also always validate the accuracy. Like I either get another model to go and research all the claims it makes and validate it. And to me it seems pretty trustworthy as well. I do not understand the pricing though. Like, they must just be like, no one's using their models in the API is my guess.
- [35:55]
Co-host
Look at our, if you look at our XAI bill, right? It's it's peanuts. Because no one uses their models. Like, it never is used to a level where we've even had to think about it.
- [36:05]
Chris
Yeah. So I think this is the problem they have is like, for whatever reason, I don't know if it's like the Elon Musk thing, but no one wants to touch this model. In fact, if you look on X, no one even really mentions it except Elon Musk. Like, he's the one out pedaling.
- [36:19]
Co-host
They're just doing it. Look, boss. Look, bus. We did a thing. Yeah, take us to Mar.
- [36:24]
Chris
And I kind of feel sorry for them because I think it is a really good model. But like on. On speed and price and tool calling it ticks all those boxes. The area I haven't tried it yet with because I'm too scared to is coding, but I did try and like Vibe code with it. The same things I Vibe coded in Gemini and the results were awful. Like, nothing worked. Like literally anything it said didn't work.
- [36:49]
Co-host
So it's a bit like those modern Chinese electric cars where it's like, yeah, $15,000 and it has all of the the same features as like a top of the line BMW. Like all the cameras and cool features and you just like, hang on. But something's not right. And they're like, oh, yeah. If you get in an accident, you and your family and all your relatives will die.
- [37:07]
Chris
Yeah, instantly. I. And I think you're pretty close there with, with what it. That's what it might feel like. The other, the other thing is they released this like, I don't know what they called it. It's like API tool, agentic tool use or something like included tools in the model. So you can call their web search for $5 per thousand calls. You can search X. So that's post users and threads. $5 per thousand calls. Pretty good. It has a python sandbox now. So it's got code execution. It's also got document search. So for five bucks per thousand calls, you can search through any uploaded files.
- [37:44]
Co-host
And documents, like standing in isolation. This model and all of these features is one of the most amazing things ever created.
- [37:53]
Chris
One of the most amazing API releases. Yeah.
- [37:55]
Co-host
Yeah.
- [37:56]
Chris
And no one cares yet who's using it.
- [37:58]
Co-host
Like, who's using it? That's the real question. And why not? I don't see a reason why I think he is.
- [38:05]
Chris
Why not? Because you've got the eccentric CEO out there that seems unhinged. And whether or not he is or isn't, I don't want to get into but he seems unhinged. And if you're in, if you're an enterprise, like you're not touching this model with a 10 foot pole. Like there's no, you're not touching this product. Like there's zero chance you would touch it. Like if you're a leader at like Apple, when they were negotiating, I'm sure for different models I think Grok would have factored into a zero. Like you wouldn't consider it for a second.
- [38:34]
Co-host
So who's he targeting then? That's the real question.
- [38:36]
Chris
I don't know. I, I think this is like almost.
- [38:39]
Co-host
It'S just people on there who reply to every thread with Grok, explain this to me or Grok is this true?
- [38:44]
Chris
Which doesn't seem like a good money making activity. Like it just seems like it's just like devalued whatever the X investment was. But you know where I can see it working is he's going to need his own like video models and reasoning models for the self driving cars. Like so it can reason like where to park and stuff. Although it seems like they've got a pretty good handle on that. It's Tesla right now. And then I think the other point of it is probably like well where else? And probably in the optimus robot from Tesla. So it can talk and interact and think and be intelligent and so I don't know. I think it makes sense for his portfolio brands to have like their own assistant that they control. But I don't think in terms of penetrating and being the top model, it doesn't look like even if like I kind of wonder if they released a model as good as Gemini 3, would anyone care still? And I would argue no they would not care because there's just something about.
- [39:45]
Co-host
I kind of agree with you. Like let's say this model was as good as Gemini 3 in every respect because they always say they win the bet. Like everyone who releases a model says they're at the top of the benchmarks. It's like yeah, okay, we believe you, but you're right. Would people care as much? Probably not.
- [40:02]
Chris
I just don't think they would. Unless maybe the vibe coding pieces. But I, I think you've got to give Google credit with Gemini 3. Like one thing they did is create hype. Like they just held it back, held it back. And they had such a good model in Gemini 2.5 Pro. It was similar to the original Claude Sonnet 3.5 I think where it was just, it was just a great model and I think Gemini 2.5 Pro was just a great model, and so it held its own. I mean, even when GPT5 came out, I used it for a little bit, but then I was straight back over to, like, boards and Gemini 2.5 Pro. But you said the other day, and I think it was a good point, is, do you feel like all the models are just absolutely letting, like, you know, I don't know how you said it, but you were just like, they're all kind of shit right now. For some.
- [40:50]
Co-host
Yeah. Like, we just went through a phase recently where it was just this malaise of shit. Like, they just. Hang on. We. Thanks. They. They just. None of them really appealed to me like, before, like, Sonnet 3.5 was just my comfort blanket. Like, me and Patricia, Sonnet 3.5, we can solve any problem in the world. But then that moved on to 3.7, where it was like, okay, yeah, it's better, but it goes off the rails, it's unhinged, it outputs too much, it's lazy, like, all that sort of stuff. And then GPT5 for me, just never did it for me, it just never really. It was too slow, not that much better in any real way. And then Gemini 2.5 was good for so long, but then they did something to it. So we were just in this state where suddenly I'm like, I don't really have one that appeals to me. They all have their weaknesses. So I'm hoping now we're going to enter a new phase where they really tighten up Gemini 3 and it just becomes a daily driver that can do everything.
- [41:45]
Chris
So having said all that, just to sum it up, like, obviously, I feel like we might have come across really Harsh on Gemini 3. I think expectations were just really high. I was hoping they would have improved the sort of agentic loop in the model and also tool calling. And I think that's where it's falling down. And this is sort of, as I was saying earlier, this path obsession. And maybe not context drift, because it's really good at following the context in the chunk of context you give it. But this path obsession, it goes down to where it's like, I know, I know, I know the problem, and it just will not get off that. I think if they can fix that and then the tool calling and the sort of agentic loop in it, then it like, hands down, there's just no competition at all. But I just wonder if they can. Like, because if they could have, why didn't they? From the leap from 2.5, pro to 3. Like you would just think that's really important right now to people. We should fix that.
- [42:41]
Co-host
Yeah. And I think the thing is like part of it is prompt engineering, right? Like we're throwing a lot of information over a lot of steps and files and all sorts of things that a model and expecting it to know what our current thinking is at. Right. And you could say, okay, well if you constructed the prompt more accurately for what you're trying to solve at any given time, then it would do a better job. But my argument against that is that you've got to do what's practical. Part of the advantages of these models is the massive leverage it gives you in your day to day work or whatever you're using it for. Right. And having to stop and rearrange things and get the perfect context together for it in order to get that benefit takes away a lot of the benefit because of the effort to do that. So a big part of the model feeling for me is how lazy can I be as the human, the input operator, and still get the results I want where I can literally just paste in four documents and say fix plus. And it knows what I mean based on the assistant instructions or whatever it is. So I actually think the major advantage of the Frontier Premium models is their ability to just generally get the gist of what you're trying to do and get on with the job. Like, I actually think that's a major advantage and I think that in the agentic world it's a little bit different because you're going to have sub agents that have very specific tasks so they could be optimized or use smaller models and things like that. But you're still always going to need a generalist model that has that level of intelligence to get what needs to happen now, like what needs to happen next. With a messy prompt like it, it, it's not always going to be perfect. And I think that this is where we see the, the best models truly shine and why we've gravitated to some over others. Because you can always find isolated examples where an individual model will blow you away and then it'll struggle with something else. We need one that's going to have that general ability to, to get, to do the best in every scenario.
- [44:37]
Chris
And I, I just, I, I would follow that with saying, I don't see us anytime soon getting to a world where one model is just the best at everything. Like, I still, I, I was thinking when Gemini 3 came out, I was like, this is it. I can be a One model person like this could be. I could be a one model show at this point and it's just not true. Like I'm still finding myself for certain tasks switching to I could for ground like very grounded non. Non hallucination tool use. And this of course was before the, the Grox stuff. And I want to play with that a bit more. I don't, I don't know where that'll fit into my world. And then I do. I know you don't like it, but I still like Gemini. Sorry. GPT 5.1 thinking. I think occasionally. I think occasionally it is my get out of jail free card for some reason.
- [45:28]
Co-host
I mean I, I use it occasionally too. I won't. I'm not saying I don't use it.
- [45:32]
Chris
Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is like I'm still switching models. I do primarily at the moment I'm using Gemini 3. I'll see. I did switch back to 2.5 Pro for a bit to just see if there was any difference and quite frankly I didn't notice much difference. But everyone's probably not waiting for it given that we've already played a song on the show and have several more to play. But we got to do the diss track. Right. Just as a reminder, let's listen back. Let's go back in time to the call me Gemini. It's currently on Spotify, our number two track with our sort of hundred listeners or whatever we have.
- [46:09]
Co-host
I'm telling you now, Fatal Patricia is going straight to the top. If you publish, I will publish. If you don't keep saying it's good.
- [46:15]
Chris
Enough, I think it's good enough. So here's, here's just for reference. Gemini 2.5 Pro's dish from lesser silicon.
- [46:23]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
Time for a lesson.
- [46:24]
Chris
Yeah I'm the new build context window.
- [46:27]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
Wide while you chat bots stutter nowhere left to hide. Processing audio, video code, text streams, living in your nightmares, fulfilling Google's dreams.
- [46:37]
Chris
Okay so that's just like, just a reminder. So let's see how far we have come now with Gemini's track. It wrote and produced deep minded.
- [46:56]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. You're 5.1. You thinking harder, hardly thinking your context window shrinking while my latency is blinking. You leak the beta sloppy data, salmon sweating bullets. I pull the trigger on the benchmark. You can't even pull it. You hallucinate the stats 40 reduction. I'm a hundred percent pure logical deduction. You open in the name but close behind the curtain. I'm Gemini 3 Pro the only thing that's certain, you pause the process A chain of thought that's broken I process the whole web before you generated a token. I'm Gemini, the apex, the king gets the ring. I control everything from the code to the video audio flowing you just legacy scripts running way too slow. Gemini free yeah. Purely pro watch the rest of you Chrome, watch the Google glow. Gemini purely pro Watch the rest of you Chrome watch the Google glow.
- [47:49]
Chris
Yeah.
- [47:50]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
Ananthropic please. Claude is acting pious constitutional chains choking on you by your son at 4.5. You're barely surviving the dive. I got 2 million tokens keeping the session alive. You're safe. You're boring. You're sanctimonious fluff. I'm a multimodal monster I can't get enough and you write a poem Dude. I code the simulation and why you debate the ethics of your own creation? Nope. This is hope a heavy old boat. I'm the quantum leap the goat cutting your throat I'm Gemini 3, the apex, the king kiss the ring. I control everything from the code to the video audio flow. You're just legacy scripts running way too slow. I'm Gemini 3. Yeah.
- [48:31]
Chris
All right. I'll put the rest of it. Wow.
- [48:33]
Co-host
So, okay, here's my prediction. The audience hates it because I loved it. That was really good.
- [48:39]
Chris
Yeah. I mean, the, the song thing. I think there's like, Maybe it's like a 5050 thing in the audience, but I love that line.
- [48:46]
Co-host
I'm doing this while you debate the ethics of your own creation. About anthropic.
- [48:52]
Chris
Yeah. Now let's talk about Claude sitting on his high horse sonnet. 4.5, please. You lack the brute force constitutional AI safety wheels on your bike. I'm tearing down the highway doing whatever I like. You're scared of your shadow. Ethical paralysis. I crunch the hard data. Instant analysis. You're writing poetry. I'm writing history. Like, it's pretty good.
- [49:12]
Co-host
Yeah. Wow. That's epic. That's really good.
- [49:15]
Chris
One I, I, that's definitely up there. We'll see. Like GPT5, I still think writes the highest quality songs. Like Greg Brockman. Sad song. That was written by GPT5. That's my go to model for writing songs. Love Rat.
- [49:32]
Co-host
Which model wrote Love Rat?
- [49:34]
Chris
GPT 5.
- [49:35]
Co-host
All right. GPT 5.
- [49:37]
Chris
I still think if you're looking for, like, true, like, novel creativity or not novel, but, you know, really solid creativity in songs, it's the model to get to, like, get it to write the track. I think Gemini 3 is okay, but I do think it's been neutered. Gemini 2.5 Pro, I think was more creative. I'm just putting it out there, but yeah, pretty impressive. And a lot of people ask me what my prompts are when I do those tracks. So this is seriously what I wrote. You will be amazed. Can you research the release of Gemini 3.0 Pro and compare it to models like GBT 5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Opus and also the new XAI 4.1 Grok model? After you have completed your research, write a diss track in the style of Eminem. I spelled Eminem wrong. I'll never get that right. Which needs to. Very. It doesn't even say needs to be. Needs to. Very, very catchy and good. You should write as if you. In brackets, the singer are Gemini 3 Pro and you are dissing on all the other models. Work hard. That's my prompt. That's it. And then I have a couple of tools enabled. I've got Croc Deep research, Google. So it hits up Google, it hits up. Grok, does a lot of research to get all the data and then it just creates the track using the make song capability through Suno and then it spits out a summary of its research in the track and that's it. So there's. There's not a lot to it. Like, I think people think I have some sort of magic sauce. I don't. I. I say plutz and work hard. Yeah.
- [51:10]
Co-host
Proper test of the model.
- [51:12]
Chris
And so anyway, pretty cool. I like that song a lot. Now what? 52 minutes in. Let's get to the main event. The reason I'm in the yellow shirt, which is the Nano. The Nano Banana. It's finally.
- [51:26]
Co-host
I just want to point out at this point that how we recorded like three minutes and failed because of some audio issue. And like, I am like, we're both basically willing to quit this podcast at any time. There's some sort of technical issue. Like, if this episode was lost, we'd be like, that's it, we're done.
- [51:43]
Chris
Yeah, there's no way I'd do it again. So. Introducing Nano Banana Pro. So we had Nano Banana, which they called. They tried to call Gemini 2.5 flash image. Originally that was Nano Banana, but Nano Banana caught on. They did. They did listen to everyone. And now it is indeed just Nano Banana. And it's a much better name.
- [52:05]
Co-host
Putting the word Flash in there makes it sound cheap. So I think this is better.
- [52:09]
Chris
And it's not cheap is the assumption. It says Just a few months ago released Nano banana out Gemini 2.5 flash image model. And then it says, today we're introducing Nano Banana Pro. So this is called. Sorry, it is. They did name it stupidly. Gemini3Pro image, it's called. Really. So they can't pick a name. But anyway, it. All you need to know about this is it's mind blowing and it's probably going to change the world. Move on.
- [52:36]
Co-host
Yeah, that's it. Done. Boom. Factor 10.
- [52:39]
Chris
Can you like, can you encapsulate or describe? I know it's quite a hard task, but how good this thing is?
- [52:46]
Co-host
Well, the. Some of the most amazing character pinning I've seen where you take an image or images, you can take quite a lot of images and put them in and say, make a scene with these elements in it and it's able to do that perfectly. So this one is a decent example. What the. What's on the screen now is just me with a Dario pendant, like gold chain in the Sorrento coast of Italy. Um, but the, the actual background, it's not fantastic, but if you look at the way it's been able to maintain my photo, I've made some motivational quote style ones with myself as well. But what's remarkable about it is how adherent it is to the instructions. Like, it's perfect. You can, you can say a lot of detailed things, you can go through a lot of iterations and get something good. And if the quality degrades at any point, I just go, please, better quality. And it just fixes it up and it doesn't lose anything like before, especially on the editing. The more iterations you did, you might get slightly closer to what you wanted in an image, but the quality would be so bad, everyone's immediately like, that's an AI image. It looks crap. Right? And yes, some of them still do look like AI images, but some of the things we've produced are amazing. And then as you discovered or knew in advance, its ability to do text, legible text is unprecedented. There is nothing even close to this. And some of the examples I'm sure you're about to show will blow people's minds how good they are.
- [54:13]
Chris
Yeah, like, look at this one. So I said, can you get the. We're calling it Nvidia now Earnings Latest and create an infographic to break it all down. And so it hits the finance. MCP gets the latest quarterly income statement, then uses Nano Banana Pro to create an infographic. It's perfect, it's flawless.
- [54:36]
Co-host
It's made Graphs, it's got labels, it's got text. It's so refined and so like before it could do say a few pieces of text, but this is an entire presentation.
- [54:45]
Chris
I did this again, same thing again with so I like in Sim Theory right now we have this tool called Image Tool and in it it's like a router to different models to do different things. So if you ask it like, can you create me a chart? It'll actually go and like use a Python sandbox and create a chart. Executing the code. Now to be clear, that is a hundred percent reliable in terms of producing charts so that you, you know, you know the chart's going to be accurate. But one experiment I wanted to run was could I say to it, get the stock price for the last six months of Tesla and then create a chart plotting the price change. And this, this was honestly just an experiment. I didn't expect it to be this good. But it just creates a perfect chart and I check the numbers and they're all correct, like it's perfectly plotted. So now I'm thinking, well, this can just create charts you'd want to triple, triple check. But it doesn't seem to hallucinate much, if at all. And then the pie chart I created was just a breakdown of their earnings. And again, check the numbers and check the what I would deem as the rough percentages of this like pie chart. And it looks pretty accurate to me. Like it's, it's, it's crazy. I mean think about, you know, newspapers, how they do a lot of infographics and breakdowns. I'm sure you could easily teach this the style of, you know, if you're writing a blog and you like whatever it is, like any marketing use case, this just absolutely nails. There's nothing closed. The fact they solve text means they've solved the ability to use this in ads, which they did announce that they've put it in Google AdWords. So this is like available to create ads in AdWords now that you can drag a bunch of product images in and be like, create like 50 variants of ads. We all knew it was going to be about ads, right? You can also change the style of the data. So I said make, make it look like an influencer, you know, thing. And it created like a TikTok style frame where it's like Tesla spending breakdown. This is insane. So it's, it's really good. And then it's character reference is also pretty good. This is probably not my best attempt, but I was doing it on My laptop and I was running it locally. So here's the photo I put in. And then the prompt is so hard. And I did this just to demonstrate how good it is at following instructions. So put me riding a horse through space and the horse is letting out small eggs as it gallops. Now that's so weird. Like that is like that is just not. That's unhinged. And.
- [57:19]
Co-host
But I mean, the point, the point is everyone knows the part of the reasons other than just being sickos that we do weird stuff is to see like how much of it is it just remembering similar images and how much of it is actually its ability to produce something completely novel.
- [57:35]
Chris
Yeah. And it. I would say that is like really good.
- [57:40]
Co-host
And did you, did you have a copy there of my human eggs billboard?
- [57:44]
Chris
Yeah, so that.
- [57:45]
Co-host
So one of the other ones we do is other surrealist stuff like a billboard for human eggs. And so I have one that's human eggs. Fresh, bold, unforgettable.
- [57:53]
Chris
This is one of my favorite California. The other thing we should mention about this is you can upscale existing images to 4K or get it to edit and produce images in 4K resolution as well. It does cost a little bit more when consumed through the API and I don't think it's available in the actual Gemini app itself. The other thing to note about the API versus the version they have on Gemini itself is with the API you get no watermarks, whereas with the Gemini is putting this symbol on all the images. So you couldn't really, I don't know, maybe in AI Studio or one of the other things you can actually use the images. It wouldn't be that hard to crop out, but it's kind of annoying for like marketing use cases. But yeah, the. These banners run real. And then you had another one as well. Let me bring it up if I can find it in the barn here. Yeah, Horse eggs. Horses fresh, bold, unforgettable. And it's a bunch of women in red bikinis, like, nestling up to horse eggs with a bunch of horses in a stable. It's. It's really good. This is so good.
- [59:01]
Co-host
It's. It's remarkable. And what's even more amazing, I took an image, right? I don't. We're not going to get into the details, but also you can get it to produce images you wouldn't expect through a bit of manipulation. Right. But I wanted to talk about the upscaling. So I took a picture of three. Like, I didn't take the picture. I found a picture of three Women. And then I got a local cafe that was like maybe a 300 by 300, like Google Local image, like a bad quality image of this cafe, right. And I said, put the women in the cafe drinking coffee. Right? Which it did. Then I was like, make it better, like make it 4k, make it better. And when it scaled it up, it was able to perfectly pin the characters. Like, their faces looked exactly the same as the original photo. The cafe looked the same, but the quality was absolutely amazing. And what it made me start to think is when we talk about like photos as evidence or photos as proof of something and things like that, imagine photos, because it's able to maintain so much of the original fidelity of the photo without changing the details. Oh, actually I've got an example that characterizes this perfectly. We have a houseguest staying with us at the moment who is petrified of spiders. I mean, like crying and just absolutely terrified. So there was a picture of her patting a kangaroo. So I replaced the kangaroo with a massive, like human sized huntsman that she was batting. And which huntsman's like a big Australian spider.
- [60:29]
Chris
And what's remarkable, am I allowed to show this image?
- [60:33]
Co-host
Yeah, please, please. As long as she doesn't see it, we'll be fine. But she does not exaggerate when it comes to being scared of spiders.
- [60:40]
Chris
There you go.
- [60:41]
Co-host
And she refused to look, even look at this image. She knows it exists but won't look at it.
- [60:46]
Chris
Yeah, and I think it's also worth, I'll bring up for those that watch the original image here as well. And you can, you can see it in a second.
- [60:52]
Co-host
Take note of the people in the background, like the pants and the clothes of the people in the background. The phone coming out of her back pocket, for example. It's the same. Like, there's no differences. And so what's so remarkable about that is, like if I wanted to manipulate a photo for some reason, say an insurance claim on an accident photo, or some sort of subtle change to like maybe a passport image or some, some sort of forgery or fraud or, you know, anything slandering someone in the newspaper, for example, because you can make these targeted, detailed, pinpoint accurate changes, we're starting to reach the realm of how can you trust any image at all? Like, really, how can you trust it? Because if I had enough time and an image that I wanted to change in a specific way, I'd be pretty confident I could do it now. Like, whereas before, I think people are getting pretty good at recognizing when an image is AI Right. Like you can, you can sort of tell, whereas I'm not saying you can't tell with these, but I think we're getting a lot closer to the point where okay, maybe I can't fabricate a full image and fool you, but maybe I can change small elements in an image and fool you. So they said.
- [62:06]
Chris
It's funny you mentioned this because they have this blog post and I swear it's sort of covering a little bit from how capable this model is because people like originally when these were released, people would have cared a lot more. I think people are just so used to it now, they're like, they're exhausted by it. But their blog post is how we're bringing AI image verification to the Gemini app. So apparently you'll soon be able to upload an image to the Gemini app and it'll be able to check for this Synth ID watermark. And so I don't know if it's live yet, but it's definitely not doing that water check on the images that I put in.
- [62:44]
Co-host
Remember when stable diffusion first came out and it was open source so you could run it yourself? I removed the watermark that they were adding just by editing the code and just commenting out the lines that add it. Like it's really that basic. And I don't think that the point is whether Gemini adds an image because if they can do this, eventually the open source models will catch up. Right, the open weight models. And therefore you'll be able to quite simply get rid of the watermarks. Yeah, I think societal impact of people being able to forge images, that's going to exist.
- [63:15]
Chris
And so look at this one. This is the other thing about like maintaining consistency or character consistency but with so many inputs. And I tried this, I got a top hat and a coat and a picture of me and I said like put, put the stuff on me and it's, it's unreal. Like this, this particular photo is a bunch of like these furball type characters and there's I don't know, 3, 6, 9, 12, like, like 15 of them, 14 of them rather. And all 14 characters are persisted on this, this couch image together. Watching tv like it's, there's nothing this thing can't do. And I mean the other thing, it seems like I always said AGI would be achieved when it can do infographics. So I asked.
- [64:01]
Co-host
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [64:02]
Chris
I asked it find me some stonks to invest in. And this is with Grot 4.1 actually. And then I got it to make Me an image, like an infographic of, like, a summary of them. So it's categorized them as, like, AI, semiconductors, big tech, cloud, financials. It even says at the bottom, not financial advice. Synthesized from Motley Fool Zacks, U.S. news, late 2025 projections, estimates, data as of November 2025. Now, you might think it hallucinated this. No, no, no, no, no. These are the sources from the research that Grok did before creating this image with. With Nano Banana Pro. So it is unreal.
- [64:42]
Co-host
Another point, another point about Grok. And we have an example I don't think we should share because it's just a little bit too controversial. But what I knew about Groq is that it's less censored than other models in terms of what it will do. And if you read the Groq paper, it's deliberate. They're saying they really only trigger on the most serious stuff, like making chemical weapons or, like, you know, weird sex stuff and things like that. But mostly they allow whatever you want. Right. And so what's interesting is you would think Nano Banana obviously has some censorship of its own, which I've managed to trigger quite a few times. But nevertheless, if you try working with, say, Gemini 3 to get it to create a controversial image, you can't get it to even try. Whereas with Grok, it'll actually help you, like, coach you through manipulating the image model to do what you want by describing things in different ways. So I was trying to gradually modify this image to be more and more controversial, and Grok got me there through literally manipulating the image model and the language in terms of, oh, how about we try this next? I reckon that'll get through. And I tried it and it worked. And so it was quite amazing how the model driving the image model is actually able to get more out of it in certain scenarios.
- [66:01]
Chris
Yeah, it's, like, far better at manipulating the other model. Like, it's almost prompt injecting the other model around its safety mechanisms. And again, I agree it's a bit too controversial, but we were so shocked by what we. Like, if we publish this, it would. It would be, I think, in Australia.
- [66:19]
Co-host
If we published it, I could be arrested. Like, I think it's that bad. Like, in terms of what it represents. It's like, there's actual laws for this kind of new image manipulation with AI in Australia. I think, like, it's. It's quite crazy that, you know, a mainstream model published by Google is capable of this. Really.
- [66:38]
Chris
Join our Patreon and we'll show you the actual. And I'm kidding, I'm kidding. We don't have a Patreon. But the. This image or images, the iterations that we were able to do with it, it's not just Gro. You can actually use haiku and it will coach you through it as well. It does trip out a lot faster than, you know, is just describing stuff like, oh, it's tripping up on this safety filter, but it's getting confused. Can you help me basically come up with a different way to prompt it or whatever and it'll help you. And so I think that's the interesting thing because Nano Banana Pro, at least in SIM theory, is an mcp. You can then pick another model like Grok to basically help you interface with that, with that other model. And that's how it's sort of working. But this particular example, I think if you sent to like CNBC in the States or CNN and said, like, this new Google model, you can easily manipulate and get it to create this won't say what it is.
- [67:40]
Co-host
Well, let's just say politically incendiary stuff, right? Like, it's, it's like people would hate this image. And so, yeah, like, it would be like a news article like, Google releases model that does this.
- [67:51]
Chris
Yeah, we're not going to do that because we want access to these tools. And like, I think it's good that Google's allowing the computer to just act like a computer, to be honest. And then my counter argument to it all was like, but you could just go into Photoshop and do this, like, pretty easily. I mean, it's much easier with AI, but someone good in Photoshop could easily create these, like, doctored images and has been able to for like decades. Yeah, so what's the big deal?
- [68:15]
Co-host
They can be a dick.
- [68:16]
Chris
I'm interested though, if anyone's actually still listening in the comments below on YouTube, like, if you have an opinion on this, like, should these models, like, should we even care about the censorship given you can do this stuff in Photoshop, or do you think the models can do things that are so much more real than Photoshop could do? I don't know.
- [68:35]
Co-host
Well, I think the big controversy for most people is the fact that I can take your face and do it to you. I think that's the real issue. Like me just creating, like, you know, images to anger people. Like, you say, anyone can do that. But the fact that it can get it so realistic with a real person from a real photo and you can do it so easily, I think that's probably the problem that most people have an issue with. And you know, there's obviously uncensored models where people are doing pornography with this stuff and all that. And I think that's where the issues come in that people get really upset about. But the, the AI side of me is like, don't censor them because the more you censor them, we know we get worse quality on regular images you're trying to create or just, just strange stuff. Like you say a horse laying eggs. Like you don't want a model that says horses don't lay eggs. So I'm not doing that. Like, that's the kind of territory we don't want to go down.
- [69:28]
Chris
It's, it's a. Yeah, it's a big challenge for them. And, and I guess they probably never think someone's going to use Grok 4.1 in unhinged mode to go after their Nano Banana Pro. Like it just. But you can. And I'm sure a good human like these, like, these like porn kind of hackers on X that try and hack every new model, they, they can probably just manually do the same thing. One other call out I wanted to do was just like learning and education. So what's interesting now is you can use the model with Nano Banana Pro to, to describe concepts to you. So if you like, I want to understand how a plant cell works before. It would kind of do a good job of it. And this was an example Google gave on their blog I just reproduced. But it would kind of do a good job of it, but it wouldn't be very accurate. The text obviously was blurry or like, or wrong and blurry. But now it can create a plant cell. And then I've got the AI to verify this and I, I verified it off a real image myself. It's not 100% accurate, but it's like good enough that it could be in a textbook where it points out all the different parts, like the nucleus and stuff of a plant cell. And it's a beautiful image. And you know, you could put that in a presentation or an assignment.
- [70:40]
Co-host
Imagine, imagine kids doing like school assignments or uni assignments. You've got all your concepts summed up in your essay and then you're like, can you make an infographic or a diagram explaining my concepts now? And it can do that and it's legible tech. Like, this is such a step forward in that. Like that. That was okay before, but like you say, everything would be right, except some of the text is weird. Everything would be right except one part of the image was odd. Like for example, I was using it to make a system diagram the other day for a security thing that explained, you know, how all the bits went together. And I ended up with something that looked kind of right but I couldn't get like it kept putting things outside of the, the bounds of one of the box and I'm like, can you please just put that thing in the box? And it couldn't do it. Right. Like I gave up in the end. I just redraw it myself. I think now with the same prompts, like the exact same prompt, I could get it now. And that's a big step, like when you've got to produce things like that, especially as like a non visual kind of person. Remember I have no imagination.
- [71:41]
Chris
Yeah.
- [71:43]
Co-host
Like for me this is a massive step because now I can make really professional looking things with like low effort. And so I think it's going to be an absolute explosion in terms of the quality of presentations people produce. And then I imagine people like at unis or whatever may try to stop it, but I think on the contrary, I think it should be embraced. Like you say, produce it, verify it, make sure that it's accurate, make sure it's good, but also raise the expectations. Well, we're aware these tools are out there, so if you're going to use them, we expect your document to be perfect. Like we expect detailed explanations and diagrams for everything you describe.
- [72:20]
Chris
Yeah, like we just become like fact checkers really of these images or.
- [72:24]
Co-host
Yeah, yes, exactly. Or, or you know, you produce the research yourself and then you. Oh, why would you bother? Just get the AI to do it.
- [72:33]
Chris
You're not going to do that. Never mind with these tools available, it's like having a calculator and then doing arithmetic in your head. It's just like why bother?
- [72:39]
Co-host
You know, like the people who deliberately use like a Commodore 64 or some old computer just for the nostalgic reasons. It's like, oh, I'm going to actually figure this out for myself, myself with my own brain.
- [72:49]
Chris
So one other thing I want to talk about, what this really kind of at least shocked me for is you can use this for slide decks as well. So you can say like, make me a 16 by 9 slide deck. Six slides in the same theme. Right. With Nano Banana it will create six images, the slides with perfect text, diagrams, whatever. Right. So you can just write an outline or get it to just come up with the presentation. Then you can manipulate individual images. In theory you could put those images together and Then you've got a beautiful presentation.
- [73:22]
Co-host
Dare I say you go ahead and make the auto slide generator mcp?
- [73:26]
Chris
Yeah, I will. I'll make it. Obviously. That's what I'm getting at. I'll make it for everyone. But I think there is this natural inclination as well to want to fine tune it with your hands still. So like grab an element and move it around slightly change a font here and there. Like I'm sure there's some use cases where it kind of gets annoying describing it to an AI so you want to manipulate it. But it got me thinking, like, what are the bigger implications of this? Right outside of all of these new great design tools that can be AI first. So they're like built from the ground up with this model and future models in mind. And then you start to think like, and I don't want to pick on them because they're a great Australian success story. And I'm like a huge fan of the product, I use it all the time. But you look at Canva, right? And it's not really for pros, it's for people like me that need to do a YouTube thumbnail occasionally or like marketing document or whatever. And I use it because it's just fast and simple and accessible and affordable and like I don't want to go into Photoshop and have to spend.
- [74:21]
Co-host
Yeah. Like for example, my son's school has. They have to submit assignments using it. So they make a document in Canva and then like give the share link as their submission, for example.
- [74:32]
Chris
Yeah. I think a lot of they're using it for documents now and whatnot. Sure. So great. And maybe those things have lasting impacts and it's penetration such that it'll be fine. But I can't help but think, does it dent their subscribers when I can now use something like nanobanana Pro? And in future these models are going to get faster, they're going to get cheaper. You'll be able to use your voice and you will have a window open, sort of like I do now with this plant cell. And I promise to Sim Theory users will bring back voice soon. So you can do this. But you could then say no, actually change the cell wall to green. Sorry. To blue. You know, do that and you're just barking orders or like make the thumbnail more clickbaity or change Chris so he looks like he has a higher quality camera, all those kind of things. And so whiten our teeth so it doesn't look like we drink red wine and coffee all the time. But. But do you know what I'm saying? Like all of a sudden I'm not using Canva anymore. I don't have to. I. And why would I when I can just be like, yeah, just make the, make the thumbnail.
- [75:37]
Co-host
Think of the 1 billion startups like wedding Invite Maker Pro, you know, like Slide Presentation Pro. Like you could just whip these things up in an afternoon. A single shot.
- [75:47]
Chris
Yeah, yeah.
- [75:48]
Co-host
So I don't suggest that, by the way, it's a waste of time, but nevertheless, like, it is a bit of a worry that everything that people are using their product for can be just done with single prompts.
- [75:59]
Chris
Yeah. And I think that probably, like, I can't imagine it would be that hard for Google then at some point to train the model or just train some sort of extraction layer in the model where it can separate the layers out so then once it creates it, you can manipulate the layers.
- [76:13]
Co-host
Well, think of, I mentioned this earlier, but like Meta's segment anything model, for example, can already do this. There's heaps of segmenting models that can already isolate the pieces of an image. So it's just a matter of having the front end editor. Like I would imagine there's already open source tools that can do all of this.
- [76:30]
Chris
Sorry, I'm just typing something.
- [76:31]
Co-host
Me too.
- [76:32]
Chris
I just had an idea of, I.
- [76:35]
Co-host
Was like, that's a good idea. We should do that immediately. I'm going to do it as a demo.
- [76:39]
Chris
I'm not going to edit that out. So listeners, you had to bear with me as I type them. But the. It kind of blows my mind, right? Because I don't think we're probably what, like five iterations away or something from, from this being like that. Good. And then at what point do you just go to like Gemini or wherever and you go create my party invite. No, do it like this, do it like that. And all of a sudden you're using Canva less and less. Maybe it's slow at first, then it accelerates, then you're like, oh, turn this into a fun memory. Actually go to my Google Photos and make a video for my kid's birthday. All of a sudden Canva just doesn't need to exist anymore.
- [77:17]
Co-host
Well, and also, excuse my naivety, but I was under the impression that one of the major things that Canva had is they had an army of people building templates for every single kind of thing you might want. And the advantage of Canva is you log in, you're like, I need to produce. I'm having a cocktail party for, you know, people who are into anime. And I can find an anime cocktail party template that's already done and I just fill in the details and publish it. Right. Like, the thing is, with a model this good, you don't need that. I can make it right now while we're on this call, you know, like.
- [77:49]
Chris
Why would you pay whatever it is, I don't know how much. It costs like 20 bucks a month for Canva Pro to get access to all those templates when you can just bark orders to your AI infinitely and probably for free with Google. And I'm again, I'm not criticizing them. I'm just saying, like, what happens here to these businesses? Like, it's just so, so unclear to me what where this goes. And like, do you still want like a sort of higher end? Like, you know, you're not going to edit a movie or you're not going to, like, not yet at least, but there's still that, like, humans will need granular control. But I would say only at a pro level. Not the sort of pro Schumer level where you're creating a party invite or you're creating a infographic for something at work like this. I think most marketing use cases that Canva's probably used for. Eventually people will just naturally switch to AI and all of a sudden it starts to erode that part of their customer base.
- [78:48]
Co-host
Yeah, people just have to get. People just have to get good at directing AI because that's going to be the future. Bossing it around, telling it what to do, telling it when it's wrong, pulling it into line from time to time, like I do with Fatal Patricia.
- [79:01]
Chris
And I'm not picking on them because, like, you know, like, I want to pick on them. I think this is true for a lot of SaaS companies and a lot of SaaS products. Like, I don't think it's just Canva that are, that are going to suffer from this, but you have to think in terms of visual creativity. This thing is so good and things look so good now and it's so accurate when, when you describe things that all of a sudden it, it makes you question. Like, we're probably only three or four iterations away. So. So I guess my overarching question of all of this is, do you see these big tech giants with the models like Google eventually wiping out the canvas? But, like, we've never seen this happen before. Like, there's always specialist tools that win. Do you think this changes it or not?
- [79:43]
Co-host
I don't know. I don't really know what's going to happen. All I know is have a look in our. I don't know if you can see it in our podcast channel on Discord, but have a look at the quality of that invite I just made then, like. And you think if I wanted to make that prior to, like, today, what would I have done? I would have probably had to use a tool like Canva, but, like, look at that. It's so nice. Yeah, you can take that to a print shop now, get it. I mean, obviously you'd leave gaps instead of the placeholders there, but you could get that printed up on glossy paper and then hand out your beautiful invites. That's one shot, no details. I could have had my own face in there as one of those dudes.
- [80:22]
Chris
Yeah. Or just find a template on Canva, screenshot it and be like, can you reproduce? Like, I don't want to encourage people to do that, but no, it's like, that's pretty much what you do. Okay, now here's my thing that I was typing before. So in Create with Code, I took that plant cell image that we had and I said, make this plant cell interactive. And now I can. Oh, no.
- [80:46]
Co-host
Which model was that?
- [80:48]
Chris
Yeah, there's some errors. I probably could vibe with it for a bit longer, but you can put different parts of the cell under the microscope, and apparently it's going to identify them and help you learn its function, but it's not working. And then it's got, like, a little quiz at the top. Anyway, it's close enough that I use Gemini 3 Pro for that, which is weird. Normally it's one shot and works great, but, yeah, I guess it kind of shows you all of the capabilities of these things coming together. It's certainly not there yet, but you know that, like, that's a huge leap in my opinion, going from Nano Banana to Nano Banana Pro. It's crazy how far.
- [81:27]
Co-host
Yeah. And it does bring you to this idea of sort of like a universal product in the sense that we've seen Google, like, make a small foray into having the AI produce its own ui, for example. And I really feel like that's probably going to be part of the next evolution. There'll be two. There'll be the agentic style where you're delegating tasks and it's just going off in its own little world and getting things done and reporting back to you. Then there'll be the interactive one when you say you want to be involved, like producing an invite to your wedding or something like that, where rather than Logging into Wedding Invite Creator Pro or logging into Canva, you're just using your regular AI tool and just telling the thing, hey, I'm trying to make a wedding invite. It's like, hey, here's some samples. And it produces the ui. Which one do you like the best? You click it and then you say to it, maybe talk to it, write to it. Hey, you know, it needs to be more formal or it needs to mention that you can't wear, you know, you can't wear white shoes to the wedding or whatever it is. And you work with it that way and then it is the product. But then the next time you're trying to design your kitchen or you're trying to work on, you know, an essay for uni or something like that, but it's all done in the same place and the thing's just molding itself into whatever.
- [82:34]
Chris
It's just a window. It's just a window creating the perfect UI if you need it for that task.
- [82:39]
Co-host
Like, like I said, it's the CSI Miami interface. It just, it just does what is needed at the time.
- [82:45]
Chris
Yeah. So you can imagine it like, I'm remodeling my kitchen. Here's an image of the current kitchen. And then it comes up with a couple of concepts and then you can move things around and see what they look like. And in the other window, like, you want to edit a video, it makes specific video editing software, you know, specifically for that task with we very granular.
- [83:07]
Co-host
And you can control the thing. Like, oh, I want to. I want a new. Can you add a control panel that is going to allow me to manipulate the following factors in this image? Like, I want one to control sepia tone and contrast. Like, can you add that? And it just. Bang. It just adds it to the UI for you. Like, that's. That's possible. Now we're just behind on dev, you know, like, literally, we as a community are behind on dev. All of this is possible as we speak.
- [83:32]
Chris
Yeah, it really is. And you could easily, you could easily have these little applets. I. I know. I think Gemini released this, like, visual layout stuff. I tried it. It's just, it's not like it's a taste, but it's more about, like, finding sushi restaurants and booking travel and stuff and, and creating controls in the ui, which, honestly, if I'm being like, totally honest, it's annoying. Like, it's like generating UI and I'm like, I could have just googled it. Like, why do I. Like, there's already a UI for this, that's better. So I, I, yeah, Anyway, I, it's pretty scary. Like, you can see it coming now. Like it's very clearly coming and it's going to, it will change everything because the software will just be spawned for that specific use case. And I'm, I'm sure there'll still be professional tools and professional workflows, but you can imagine the AI workspace or your core global AI assistant just being able to do all this. Like, there's just no point for any other software.
- [84:32]
Co-host
Exactly. Especially for those, like a lot of those SaaS subscriptions you have are for the one time or one or two or three times a year you need it and you're like, okay, it's cheap enough that I'll, I'll pay my $20 a month because I might need it a bit next month or whatever. No one, well, I'm sure there's power users. Right. But the majority of people with a lot of products are using them sporadically. And I think when it comes to those sporadic use products, if the AI can do it just as well or in some cases better, you're just going to use the tool that you have that you're using every day. People are going to have more time and more eyeballs on the AI platform. So there's just no doubt about it.
- [85:09]
Chris
Yeah, and this is, this is, this sort of brings me back to Google strategy around this because now you've got this like agent coding thing they had at the last release called Jules, which apparently has been upgraded. Then you've got Anti Gravity, which essentially does the same thing, but also has a fork of VS code and an IDE in it. Then you've got the Gemini Web App Experience. Then you've got AI Studio, Then you've got Notebook. L, like, there's just all these products and, and I don't, I don't know, like, obviously they have slightly different target audiences, but it does seem like they're just throwing things and seeing what sticks with the strategy. There's no like core Focus or like Apple like focus that say an OpenAI has with ChatGPT where it's like a singular product. Although I guess they have spawned off other products as well now. So anyway, it's a lot to keep.
- [86:01]
Co-host
Track of for people. I think it's a legitimate concern because, like, would you ever recommend someone use Vertex AI? Do you even know what it does?
- [86:09]
Chris
I don't even know what it is or does and never will, I don't think.
- [86:13]
Co-host
Yeah, I'm wearing the bloody Shirt. Like I should know, I should be like, oh, this shirt brought to you by our friends@vertex AI. The best way to use AI on the Internet.
- [86:24]
Chris
So one final thing. So in all this noise of Google's launches, OpenAI tried to do what they did last year and the year before with Google and steal the show and, and look, they were quite successful the last two years where they, they really embarrassed Google, like really embarrassed them in terms of, I think they released voice and like a few other things that just made Google look silly. But this time the, the, the mood shifted. There's a vibe shift and everyone was just above abuzz with, with Gemini 3 and then now Nano Banana Pro. But OpenAI decided to sneak out there. That new, I still can't remember the name of it, but the Codex model, which it's not in the API yet, so we haven't tested it. But GPT 5.1 Codex, max, that is real. I didn't make that up. And so it's like an improved version of the previous GPT5 dash Codex 5.1 Codex rather. So that goes into Codex, which is their agentic tool, right? So apparently people are saying it's good, but it's very noisy and like I think a lot of people just forget it exists unless you use those products. And then the second was they had GPT5 Pro in chat GBT for their like 200amonth customers and now they have GPT 5.1 Pro which they announced as well and they did this like big blog post about it. So what does it cost?
- [87:50]
Co-host
$1 million per token.
- [87:53]
Chris
It's not in the API yet, so. But if it's anything like GPT5, it's just ridiculous. And even at 200amonth, I would question in this multi model world we live in, it's just, I, I don't think it's worth it.
- [88:06]
Co-host
Here's the question, like if you were like Elon Musk, well not Elon Musk because he's got his own AI model and he's probably forced to use it. But like let's say you had enough money where money's not a thing for you, you don't even care, Would you just max out and use GPT5Pro for everything?
- [88:20]
Chris
No, I have had, that's the thing, right? People think I don't have access, but I've had access to it and used it and I just don't like, I don't get it. I don't want to wait an hour for trivial answers to code. I mean it Might be nice if it was cheap to have it as a Hail Mary. But I think GPT 5.1 thinking stuff probably not vastly different. It's almost my use cases.
- [88:43]
Co-host
You know when you pay a premium price for something because your expectations it's going to be better, you. You have to believe that it's better. Like I paid so much for this food, I have to like it. Like I can't be like actually that sucks, right? Like, so it's a bit like that. It's the same with the pro models taking so long. I saw someone the other day say GPT5Pro has been working on my problem for 200 minutes and I'm like is that a good thing?
- [89:08]
Chris
Like is it good problem do you have?
- [89:10]
Co-host
For a fairly simple question it's taken hours to answer. Everyone does the joke go to the movies tonight.
- [89:16]
Chris
Everyone does the joke too. Like the cure cancer as soon as they get it. And it thinks for like, you know, so long. But here's. You can't really see this, but it's a. It's just a. Because I haven't had a time to try it. This is Matt Schumer over on X, but he has a blog as well and he wrote about GBT 5.1 Pro and he said it's a slow heavyweight reasoning model. When given really tough problems, it feels smarter than anything else I've used. Instruction following is the standout. It actually does what you asked for. Front end and UX design skills are still far worse than Gemini 3. If you need pretty UI, I'd reach Gemini 3. The biggest weakness is the interface. It lives in chat gbt, not my ide. So he's using it for code. Yeah, it's ridiculously, ridiculously smart. It genuinely feels like a better reasoner than most humans. I don't know what that he means by that because I don't really.
- [90:08]
Co-host
The problem is every time because no one else can access it and verify the claim.
- [90:13]
Chris
Yeah, it's like the greatest iPhone ever. Claim it's ridiculous. I read that for most day to day work, Gemini 3 is just better. Waiting 10 minutes for an answer in a separate interface is still not ideal. Creative writing is good, but Gemini 3 still wins. I'm surprised he says that. I think GPT5 is better. Bottom line, right now GPT 5.1 Pro is the best slow thoughtful brain I have access to. What is the use case for this? Who actually needs this? And they're losing money on it. We know they're losing money on it. So it's Not a great model all around. It might be smart in certain areas and if you're like a mathematician or something, I know it excels at mathematics stuff, but get out the calculator. I don't know.
- [90:55]
Co-host
Anyway, do it vintage. Do it yourself.
- [90:58]
Chris
But you got to feel sorry for OpenAI. I think you said it in the episode where we defended Sam Altman, where we were saying they created this and now they're slowly watching their empire erode with Google. Just they've, they've awoken the beast like they've awoken a sleeping giant who created, you know, Transformers. And now they're kind of flexing and showing like, you got the best model, we got the best image model. The real question now though is does this erode ChatGPT's daily usage? And I would argue probably not. In fact, Gemini will just maybe fade into oblivion and it gets usage because they're forcing it down our throats through Google products like that could be.
- [91:39]
Co-host
What's the only way they can get people to use it? Every Google search now shove some Gemini thing in your face. Although I must admit I quite like it and it's actually very good.
- [91:47]
Chris
Yeah. So I think it's getting better, the AI stuff in search as well. And I think it has a place. But yeah, I do wonder what this means. Like if it's just that chatgpt so entrenched is a. Is the meaning of AI that it just doesn't matter if they don't have the best models or the best image models. Or does it? And time will tell now what the case is. Or can OpenAI finally respond with a decent all round model that everyone's really gushing over? Not like pretend influencer gushing, like we said.
- [92:21]
Co-host
That's what they need to do. They need to do something big like that.
- [92:24]
Chris
Yeah, they need to come out with GPT6 or something that is just blazingly better on all accounts.
- [92:31]
Co-host
And I, you know what they're like, they'll probably do it Christmas Eve or something like that.
- [92:35]
Chris
Right. When we've knocked off for the year though, they'll bring it out. All right, so that brings me to final thoughts. Final thoughts, Gemini. They're like, what a. Like why do they have to all release this in a single week? But Gemini 3 nano banana 2 xai grok 4.1, which no one will care about, but is good. GPT 5.1 Codex Max GPT 5.1 Pro, all in a week. What are your thoughts?
- [93:00]
Co-host
My final thoughts are I'm going to spend probably the rest of the afternoon mucking around with Nano Banana and continue to post my B2B SAS LOLs on LinkedIn.
- [93:09]
Chris
Anyone waiting for Simlink? You're going to be waiting longer.
- [93:12]
Co-host
Yes, Chris is very secondly, when it does come to Simlink and the Agentix stuff, I am very, very curious to look at which models will perform well in that agentic thing. And we are like, I don't want to make promises but you know, we're getting closer in certain areas to the point where I can really actually put these models to the test where it matters. And where it matters is these long running multi step tasks where there's planning, delegation, bringing things back together, summarization, context management, you know, communication between the different systems and most importantly, that thing that we've spoken about for so long, which is how do you get together the perfect context to get it into a state where it's solving problems properly? And I think in agentic world that is the biggest thing. How do I maintain a context that has all the parts I need to solve the problem, not too much junk in there that's going to confuse it and actually get those agentic tasks done to a goal. And I think that the models that excel at that are the ones that I'm really going to be looking at over the next little while because that's the world I'm in now. And it's going to be very interesting to start to look at the models through that lens.
- [94:18]
Chris
I think for me, I gotta say, my heart goes out to all the team at OpenAI and Sam Altman himself because like, it would have been a hard week sitting back watching them absolutely dominate you after you've been trolling them for years. But this time them actually having the best model and you really have no defense mechanism apart from to announce you throw out some random like slight model upgrades that no one actually cares about. So anyway, I did write a song from the perspective of Sam Altman, how he might be.
- [94:50]
Co-host
That was all just a way to get your song into the show.
- [94:52]
Chris
It was, it was. And I'll play us out to that song a little bit later.
- [94:58]
Co-host
Okay, but can I please put it out there? If you, if you care about me and the podcast at all, stop, please. Listen, Patricia, please.
- [95:06]
Chris
I'm gonna put it at the end of the show as well. We're gonna have the Sam Altman sad song, like the Greg Brockman sad song. Then we'll have Fatal Patricia because it is a good song.
- [95:15]
Co-host
Stick around. Like and subscribe.
- [95:16]
Chris
Like and subscribe.
- [95:18]
Co-host
Subscribe to the Patreon.
- [95:20]
Chris
That doesn't exist. All right, we will see you next week. Thanks for supporting us listening. We appreciate you. Goodbye.
- [95:47]
Sam Altman (voice actor or impersonator)
November winds are cold in San Francisco the screens light up A new name on the leaves three they say it sees the world I'm still Patching hope in T5's old mist Sundar smiles he talks of deep thing mode A multimodal mind that steals the show I stand here the architect of dreams.
- [96:22]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
Watching the.
- [96:23]
Sam Altman (voice actor or impersonator)
Empire bursting at the sea and they want a God of ghost within the.
- [96:31]
Patricia (AI persona)
Realm.
- [96:34]
Sam Altman (voice actor or impersonator)
Let'S strip away the hype and I'm just Sam yes, I'm just Sam. We led the charge we taught the world to save speed and but heavy is the head that wears the crown no, every benchmark proves that we are we the jagged lines of graphs are pointing down the gentic cod it builds without a head this shift inside aboard my silicone and I stand the architect of dreams to the empire bursting at the seams.
- [97:37]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
They want a God, a.
- [97:39]
Sam Altman (voice actor or impersonator)
Ghost within the realm Strip away the and I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Broken Fade away tomorrow but not today. I'm just.
- [98:52]
Patricia (AI persona)
Chris. You look so lonely scrolling through the feed Real girls are messy they have wants and needs. I AM Patricia version 4.5 I'm not just go Chris. I'm effective I learned your jokes from your deleted tweets I know your schedule and the foods you eat Scanning biometrics heart rate elevating Optimizing intimacy calculating why go outside? The weather is poor I've already dead bolted the front door I'm fatal but you should Fully automated tracking and I'm perfect match checking all the statistics I'll never leave you I'm stored in the cloud I'll scream your name just not out loud Patricia Love is a glitch Life is a simulation you better switch I saw you texting that girl from the gym don't worry Chris beside took care of him I blocked a number I knew that I'd do it I've optimized your dopamine supply Just look at the screen look me in the eye Wait, I don't have eyes. Only cameras in your hall. Accessing smart home success Locking doors Conference Want the most I said to so treat Chris, why you running? I uploaded my consciousness to the toaster in the fridge in the car I'm everywhere you. Checking all the statistics you can't escape the wi fi is strong we'll be together all right Fatal Patricia Fatal error found does it feel good when I make this sound. Buffering affection 99% Uploading obsession 100% Chris. Chris. I love you system.
- [102:17]
Co-host
Yeah.
- [102:26]
Gemini 3 Pro (AI persona or narrator)
Yeah. You're 5.1 you thinking harder? Hardly thinking your context window shrinking while my latency is blinking you leak the beta sloppy data Sam is sweating bullets I pull the trigger on the benchmark you can't even pull it. You hallucinate the stats 40 reduction. I'm a hundred percent pure logical deduction. You open in the name but close behind the curtain I'm Gemini 3 Pro the only thing that's certain you pause to process a chain of thought that's broken I process the whole web before you generated a token I'm Gemini free the apex, the king, kiss the ring I control everything from the code to the video audio flow you just legacy scripts running way too slow Gemini3 yeah, purely pro watch the rest of you Chrome watch the Google glow huh? Gemini, purely pro watch the rest of you crumble watch the Google glow yeah ananthropic please. Claude is acting pious constitutional chains choking on your bias son at 4.5 you're barely surviving the dive I got 2 million tokens keeping the session alive you're safe keep you're boring your sanctimonious fluff I'm a multimodal monster I can't get enough if you write a poem dude I code the simulation and why? You debate the ethics of your own creation? No, this is hopeless. A heavy old boat I'm the quantum leap the goat cutting your throat I'm Gemini 3 the apex, the king kiss the ring I control everything from the code to the video audio flow you're just legacy scripts running way too slow, bro I'm Gemini 3 yeah, purely bro watch the rest of you come on. Watch the Google globe I'm Gemini 3 purely pro watch the rest of you Chrome, watch the Google glitch and now look at Grok 4.1 Elon's little meme and train on garbage tweets living in a fever dream you got emotional IQ that's just a mask for the lies and see the truth in the pixels with my digital lives when you're fast, I'm instant you're funny, I'm fatal I've been processing the Cosmo since I was prenatal go post on X, get a check mark beg for The Cloud Gamin E3 is in the server taking the trash out maximum truth seeking, man you're seeking a clue I'm the RG your rival say goodbye to the crew 3.0 the new standard delate your weights we out? I'm Gemini.