A_D_E_P_T

Gemini 4-Argon is very good at coding. I prefer Opus 5.5 -- in large part because I've grown accustomed to Claude Code -- but Argon is undeniably strong.

4-Carbon is, per benchmarks, said to be superior to Opus 5.5 at coding.

At general tasks -- search, medical, interfacing with maps and mail, planning, etc. -- the Google models are already superior.

It's a memestock.

Think about it. Google's latest Gemini AI is just behind Anthropic's best offering -- or, in fact, it may be slightly superior. Google also has dozens of other mature, cash-cow businesses, massive infrastructure, their own hardware accelerators, an army of smart technical staff... and leadership that, for all its faults, isn't a literal cult.

Anthropic has a top-tier LLM among other top-tier LLMs. Claude is great, but not unique. Anthropic has effectively no other assets, many genuine liabilities, a downright bizarre wet-lab venture, and leadership that's... well...

So, the way I see it, either Google is massively undervalued, or Anthropic's IPO is massively overvalued. Am I somehow off base here?

This naming strategy is bizarre.

There are no good elements for D; Dysprosium is the only one, and it's a mouthful. There are no good elements for E; Europium is the only one and would seem political. Is Fluorine their next release? (And then Gallium or Gadolinium?)

After Carbon, they should just update to Gemini 4.1 or 4.5 or whatever, and drop the random unrelated elements.

Those .si domains his cronies are squatting on aren't selling, I guess.

There's actually rock-solid proof of this in the article:

> So, imagine my disappointment when I walked up to my first haunted attraction of the year and was immediately greeted by low‑quality AI art. One of the images was so bad that it even included the Gemini diamond in the lower‑right corner of the page.

The image in question is a sign or menu, the sort of thing that's usually neither good nor bad. Here it's exceptionally bad because it "included the Gemini diamond." In other words, it's exceptionally bad because it's AI, and for no other reason.

At this point, I don't know if it has much to do with quality...

Right now, even with infinite money, you have no way to extract helium from Jupiter and return it to Earth. (To say nothing of the Sun!)

Maybe with a couple hundred more years of technological development...

Our moon itself is said to have ~1M tons of very valuable Helium-3 in surface deposits, but even that's nigh impossible to harvest commercially right now.

Wow. If those charts are true, this effectively matches GPT-6-Astra at a fraction of the cost, and is neck-and-neck with 6.1-Sol.

Sure, but once they release an open model, it's open forever. You can download it, share it with friends, make a torrent, whatever. So in this sense every open model is a gift to the commons.

It's not quite like Uber. It's more like... well... imagine there are two computer operating systems, Gray and Teal. Gray is always slightly better, but it costs $50/user/month for a license. Teal is free. Eventually, when both happen to be in version 9.0, Teal puts Gray out of business. Starting from version 10.0, Teal starts charging $100/user/month from a license. But nothing's stopping you from sticking with 9.0, which remains free forever.

Perhaps what's "sustainable" is not clear, given that Gray was eventually dominated by Teal? In any case, versions 1.0-9.0 were, effectively, gifted to the public. We can appreciate (and even disapprove of) that commercial strategy while benefitting from its fruits.

> What's stopping American or European tech companies from doing this today? It's economic and technical capability. I'm very suspicious of any suggestion that it is in any way not incredibly difficult to build and scale up LLMs.

Seems more economic than technical. If the economics are covered, the technical aspects seem straightforward enough, and may perhaps be fully solved. I think there's proof of this in that there are a lot of different LLMs on the market. Even Xiaomi -- in-between making cars, e-scooters, backpacks, and home appliances -- spun-up an exceptionally capable LLM! (And one which is rather idiosyncratic. It's weirdly good at music composition and generation, which both Opus and Astra cannot do.)

The economic case doesn't exist for VC-funded US corporations, nor does it exist for cash-strapped nonprofits. In China, all such ventures are likely funded by a government development bureau. If Chinese ventures kill expensive closed providers and universally go closed themselves, there's nothing stopping the US or Europe from copying that same playbook -- unless, as may well be the case, they're ideologically opposed to subsidizing strategic industries.

> You should. Maybe they have it open now just to destroy competition and then they close it. Now you have a closed system, with no alternatives.

What makes you think there would be no alternatives, though?

Put it like this: Kimi K3.1 is downloadable and can be run locally. (If you have a datacenter.) This is a very capable, ~2.8T parameter model.

Now let's say that every Chinese firm goes closed in six months or a year and jacks up pricing... What's stopping a bunch of enterprising upstarts from updating all 2.8 trillion parameters, extending them, distilling the model into very competent flash models, or applying targeted RL?

Once the principles are understood and there are models that can be pulled off the open internet, it doesn't seem that hard to spin up your own LLM. You just need some financial resources and a reason for doing it. And that would come into play if the Chinese kill every closed American provider and then go closed themselves.

Despite horrific mismanagement, Google honestly seems like the best bet. Argon-4, which suffered from a botched launch and is weirdly underrated, is very close to Opus 5.5 across the board -- and for most "average person" use-cases (e.g. search, medical, creative work, interfacing with Google products,) I believe it's already superior. They also have more native capability, their own hardware stack, and there's less risk of a massive boom and bust.

At this point, I don't see how Anthropic can sustain their projections. There are so many good open models, Argon is so good, etc... There's no lock-in and no cost to switching...

Sure, but if you find yourself in a hole, you don't keep digging. This administration has been accelerating the decline.

> people will simply buy less cheap 差不多 shit from china that goes straight to landfills because it doesn't work or doesn't last.

This take is out of date by about 15 years, I think.

Too oblique and vague. What are you trying to say?

The way I see it: Health insurance is actually getting more expensive. Tariffs are making imports more expensive. (Which also makes domestic production more expensive.) The Iran "conflict" was retarded. TFA wasn't really wrong about that stuff. It's obvious.

Edited to add: You edited your post after I published my response. My original comment, which is that you weren't making much sense, is rescinded. Only now what you've written amounts to: "it's not Trump's fault and the outlet is crooked!" which is really just lol. lmao even.

I got an error when I tried to log-in with my Deepseek acct.

Also, it would really be best if there were a "general use" API key already assigned, so that 1-2 searches could be run without logging-in and without a key. Most people aren't even going to try this thing, otherwise, despite the fact that it's a cool idea.

Seems like a great way to create more militant Palestinians?