Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
blog.google165 points by leumon 3 hours ago
165 points by leumon 3 hours ago
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
It's also the only model that generates accurate translation and localization. No other frontier model comes close. Although Gemini's coding capabilities are subpar, its natural language processing is top-tier.
For heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with.
I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.
Agreed. My impression is that the more verbose output of sol, astra etc is that it helps it steer itself on long running tasks (but is worse for the human user to read)
Yes I've noticed there's also this drive to implement and start talking about how it would write specific portions of code in response to design/trade off questions. I have to prompt Sol/Astra almost every time with a note that I am not looking for implementation advice since I mostly use them as a rubber duck in the design phase
Yes, when post training models for long tasks this happens gradually. It is not easy to prevent it as such.
Is Google still chasing frontier? Seems like they haven't had a "Pro" model in forever. I think a good niche for them would be right where they are now.
For rabbit holes, how do you get Gemini to do any research before answering? I've very recently had it hallucinate on me like it's 2023, and that was on Pro/Thinking, as far as I remember.
Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times).
Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
“caveats and provisos” makes me think of Robin Williams’ genie imitating William F. Buckley Jr.
> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
This is commonly why, on Reddit in particular, you can get eaten alive.
Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident.
Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writing shorter replies on Reddit is rewarded. Nobody reads the articles, let alone a paragraph-long reply.
That all being said though, there are limits. Sometimes LLMs on high-thinking go off on full tangents based on little, and don't have the self-awareness to bring it back.
Yea. I have asked it to verify my ideas with experiments sometimes. And it cheats and warps the results so that the results are reached
Try Gemini live in a multi lingual environment. It can pick out speakers and live translate to you. Truly underrated for its capabilities.
I actually did (was going to travel internationally), and it wasn't as useful as you'd think. I would be talking to someone, and in the background someone else would be talking, and it would translate both people.
Only worked in a 1:1 in a quiet place. Still, can't complain for free.
I was surprised when (finally) trying out Claude how much I preferred Gemini's way of communicating. I wont argue Claude is better at coding, but for knowledge work, I had to dig through Claude output to find what I actually wanted. At times, it even felt borderline incomprehensible.
Just today I had Sonnet 5 generate this (asking about always-on display in the iPhone e-versions):
> This mirrors how Apple has always segmented Pro vs. non-Pro iPhones: base models got LTPS panels while Pro models got LTPO, and only with the mainline iPhone 17/17 Plus did that gap close the standard versions previously lacked the smoother 120Hz ProMotion technology and the always-on display feature, unlike the Pro models — the 17e is the one model line still using the older, cheaper panel.
(emphasis mine)
I mean, I can guess what it is trying to say, but who RL'd this nonsense?
In my experience, with minimum prompting, deepseek also generates very decent text.
Not at all in mine. Deepseek has some of the worst prose of the close to frontier models in my opinion.
I find Astra's prose very good, too. I have been using it to rewrite all my LLM-generated docs as of lately.
Does anyone know if there is a dedicated model which makes Claude output nore human readable and less slop?
Lately it became load-bearingly-reality-difficult to not only read, but to comprehend the Claude output
Wondering if people have managed to have Gemini in-front of other models like claude/codex models and only interact with that. Having Gemini act as a pure human/llm translator.
Not in the principled sense you mean but I have in fact recently started having Gemini explain to me what Claude is talking to me about, lol.
We have an agentic system that produces insights for end users, and runs most of its work on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash but as an output stage transforms the resulting text through Gemini 3.8 Flash for readability, and it works.
On my TODO is try and run all of the analysis pipeline in dense "machine speak" to save on tokens and just let Gemini sort it out at the end.
Just gave it a try - very solid release.
Copes well with thick accent, voices are pleasant and latency seems low.
Oh and I can actually use it on a workspace account - which for most of the recent releases was an account stuck in limbo. Not personal enough for personal offering, not enterprise enough for enterprise.
Well done G - will definitely be using this
Also appears to do well in other languages (prefer that when walking & talking in public for a bit of privacy)
And looks like one can trigger live mode via siri
It is completely broken for me. After I ask a single question, it starts replying to itself in an infinite loop. It answers my question, then generates another reply to its own response, and keeps going. At some point, it even starts switching languages randomly.
I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?
As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly.
I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.
I was thinking about coding specifically. Also, see all these math and physics breakthroughs, it's usually not Gemini but Fable and Astra.
Yeah its good. Reasonably priced too (at current prices, if they do raise them in January I would stop recommending it). 3.7/3.8 were good releases.
To me it's a good replacement for search engines. I ask it things like 'If redshifting destroys energy ala Noether, than how can we say that time is reversible or that entropy will find an equilibrium?' and it will not only explain, but make nice interactive diagram/toys to help. A regular search engine would have taken me hours to find an answer.
However, if I want it to DO something then Gemini is in absolute last place. I don't trust it for anything more than renaming files that I don't care about very much or extracting data (though it's too expensive for data extraction at scale).
Yeah +1 to this
People use text with LLMs but it's great to have a high fidelity "analyze this image"
I’m wondering if they even see a coding agent as a valuable prize. It’s a competitive market in a race to the bottom economically, hard to establish consistent differentiation and virtually zero switching cost for customers.
I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.
For coding models? I don't think Google is motivated to fight in that market. There's no incentive for them.
Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.
Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do.
Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow.
Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there).
I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you.
Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.
> Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.
Bragging rights to say they have a SOTA model. I guess that was more like Google of 10 years ago with moonshot projects. Nowadays, yeah, perhaps if it's not helping sell ads, it doesn't make sense.
> Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models?
Catch is, even Googlers internally do not have access to top-tier models. (or did not until recently, when apparently Claude was made accessible to the SWEs internally).
Also: Google has like a 20% stake in Anthropic, and a very fat cloud partnership
If Google didnt have their ad buisness theiy'd be out by now. They're like BlackBerry and Nokia at this point almost.
Not sure what your comment mean in the context of parent's comment.
As opposed to what, them not having it and burning money that isn't their instead like openai and anthropic? At least Google is feeding itself instead of having to create a bubble to stay alive
Google spent most of their cash, they are now taking loans for data centers too. They recorded their first quarter of negative cash flows ever
Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt.
Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries.
Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan.
No, Google is not broke.
In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.
If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.
Which is still a better position that the others? My point is you can't consider that a bad thing if you think it's ok for their competitors in the field. And if you don't and your judge them equally, then at least Google has its own cash glow and could turn the gas off at any point to go back to printing money while they have not choice.
And YouTube, and Cloud, and Play Store, and Waymo, not to mention that they could coast on their Anthropic and SpaceX stakes if they didn't have any of the above.
Maps, Waymo, TPUs, YouTube, Docs, GMail, Cloud, Android, Chrome, Photos...
They remind me of Kodak inventing the digital camera and sitting on it to preserve their film business.
Our company's Google Workspace Business only offers 3.6 flash & thinking in the Gemini App. Has anyone else seen 3.7 or 3.8 roll out?
3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro are included in the basic Workspace subscription. The Workspace admin has to upgrade your seat for the access to newer models ($17/mo now, $24/mo starting Jan 2027).
I'm the admin. I see the "AI Expanded Access" addon option in the dashboard, but it says nothing about which models it includes.
I'm still only seeing 3.6 Flash / 3.6 Thinking in my Google Workspace for Education account, and 3.5 Flash-Lite / 3.6 Thinking in my "Plus" plan Gmail account.
I have access to both, benchmarks are actually better on 3.7 for my task, but happy improvement over the others.
Not a great impression to have your demo video demonstrate how one of your 'most advanced' AI models loses to the most common check-mate pattern in all of chess.
For an LLM, just being able to play an entire game of chess without illegal moves and without inventing pieces that aren't on the board is an achievement. Even more so for a live model. Then again, who knows how much the harness helped here
Seems more than good enough for a live model though! I can imagine this demo being extended to be a lot nicer to play with. You can just feed the model engine analysis and it can make as high of quality moves as needed. No longer any correlation between the model's understanding of the position and the moves that would be made but I think that's still a really nice improvement when thinking about this as adding live voice interaction to existing chess vs computer functionality rather than adding chess to possible interactions with the latest live voice model.
agree that it’s a weird choice, but more because i don’t need my chat model to play chess at all when chess engines exist.
Gemini's Live Mode is already much better than GPT Voice in my personal experience, even though it was much dumber. It really does feel like talking to a real person. ChatGPT keeps humming to whatever I say and has some weird voices.
Excited to try this out! Shame on Google for not releasing Gemini 3.8 for Google AI Plus users yet, though.
OpenAI just released the new full duplex mode to the API as gpt-live-1 or something like that. Very realistic.
I'm wondering if Google intends to drop the next major version of Gemini Pro as a total bombshell drop to make Anthropic and OpenAI panic. They seem to be taking their sweet time on frontier model updates.
Google need to allow saving history and exclude it as training data. I will not use it seriously until this is resolved.
Agreed. They really are the greediest when it comes to data for training (unsurprising for google I guess)
I have been looking for a model that's good for GUI testing. Original computer use isn't right because it's a slow screenshot loop, which doesn't capture transition and animation. Docs says this one does up to 1 FPS. That might be fast enough. If not now, we must be within a few months of high enough sample rates to do it.
I find just letting a model record a video it can read frame by frame later works fine, Gemini 3.8 flash would be solid for that
They can't even vibecode a working VS Code extension for Gemini.
Nothing but constant errors with cryptic messages.
It's a slop factory over there apparently. We were sent the greatest slop deck of all time from their sales team. We now have a :cursed-claude: from a slide where they said "we have access to state of the art models like Claude 3" and nanobanana's interpretation of what Claude looks like as a person. It was clear the person had only read a handful of the nearly 40 slides
Did anybody watch the Primeagen's video on Google bag-fumbling? Interesting they released on the same day!
I love talking to chatgpt voice mode. Voice to voice AI is the only big leap that I see after the RL trained coding models.
My issue using the voice mode is the overly expressive mimicry of natural human intonation is distracting and starts to become extremely grating after a while.
There's one or two I find more understated but I would love a 2026 SOTA V2V model that speaks clearly but without the artificial personality layered on.
Human interaction/theory of mind relies so much on non-verbal clues for interpreting emotion/intent and so for me having those neurons firing constantly while talking to an LLM just for an emotional no-op is exhausting to put up with for more than a couple minutes.
There's one male voice that would make me assume someone was sarcastically mocking me if I was talking to an actual person because it's just so over the top.
Great tech but the voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me
When will it be available on Vertex?
I've been asking the same about the open weight models, we're buying our tokens from others now, though I think those people are renting hardware from Google in the end anyway
vertex is dead, for good reason too
Would you mind expanding on this? I thought Google changed the name to 'Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform', and altered focus to 'agent governance' workflows, but that there were no breaking changes from what was offered with Vertex AI.
I'm disappointed with "Extended Thinking" for 3.8 Flash. On the plus side, it's a strong general-purpose model and the cost-benefit is still compelling.
However, the "Extended Thinking" should be renamed to "Slightly Extended Thinking". Considering that it's the maximum thinking option for Gemini Flash in the chat UI, it doesn't actually think a whole lot, leading to an uncomfortably high number of incorrect/poor replies.
My Gemini app is still stuck at 3.5 Flash-lite and 3.6 Flash so I truly don't understand how Google rolls this stuff out. I don't use Gemini for anything serious so I'm not going to use the API, but it's my go-to for just searching basic information (replacing google search) because it's so darn fast.
Yeah still on 3.6 here too, this is like the 4th or 5th model Google has announced since they last gave me access to the latest. And I pay for pro too!
So I am building a voice assistant to control AI harnesses, and recently tried switching from GLM 5.3 Flash to Gemini 3.8 Flash because of higher tok/s and better rate limits. Before that I also used Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731.
Let me tell you unlike every other mentioned model Gemini 3.8 Flash trial had to be reverted the same day. Instead of simply delegating tasks it would invent additional requirements and implementation details it knew nothing about and no amount of convincing not to do it would work. That's the first time a model failed on me so spectacularly despite having practically same Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index as another model that just worked (and higher than working DS Flash).
The reason I think it is relevant is: Live is likely even stupider model in every way possible (except hearing better than separate STT). So beware using it for agentic scenarios.
Ensure transparency with SynthID watermarking
All audio generated by our AI products is watermarked with SynthID. This imperceptible watermark is woven directly into the audio output, ensuring AI-generated content remains detectable to help prevent misinformation. For details on our approach to safety and responsibility, review the model card.
It’s little to do with misinformation and much to do with trying to keep their model from collapsing from ingesting too much slop.
"Thinking" Good one.
They should just give up at this point, it's just embarrassing to watch.
As PrimeTime said; these are the guys that invented the 'T' in 'GPT', that deployed their first TPU in 2015, that is using billions on AI - and they are beaten by 300 people startup named Moonshot AI even. People are going to write books about this complete fumble.
Strongly disagree with that take. Kimi K3 is a distilled model. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, or to disparage the team behind it, but distilling and building on that is significantly easier and cheaper than building from the ground up.
And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.
More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.
None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at?
My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.
Intelligence.
They have "unlimited" resources and has researched AI since the very beginning - PageRank is a form of AI even. And still, Gemini is behind Claude, GPT, Grok, Muse, GLM, Kimi and is maybe on par with DeepSeek?
As I said, it is embarrassing.
If RSI is achievable, it will leapfrog everything produced so far and so it will make sense to focus on RSI instead of incremental improvements for your top model. Startups need investment and need to show progress. Google does not at the moment need to take lead in the current race.
> Grok
No one is behind grok. It literally has "be funny and irreverent when appropriate" (whatever the hell "when appropriate" means for them) baked into the system prompt. To me, that is all you need to know about how useful it is.
No serious people use it and the numbers bear it out tbh. It has the smallest market share of the "big companies" for a reason - and it's by a very, very large margin (~2.5% last I checked).
Have you used Google search at all on the past few months? Every single search brings up a live chat prompt. They're serving fast AI to billions of users at huge scale everyday
And they're making money doing it.
Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?
It’s so annoying that everyone just points to the Artificial Analysis index (or even worse, Epoch AI, where part of the score is how good the AI is at chess) as a proxy for “how good” the model is.
At least AA have a dedicated speech model index, of which this is now the leader: https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-speech
Their live models have been and continue to be at the frontier. I like them a lot!
And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.
> they have near infinite money and others have not
Given the very high margins on inference, once volume is large enough the other can also start printing enough money.