Maybe the G in AGI stands for Gemini

New Gemini model out today: 3.1 Flash-Lite, super­fast and very capable.

The Gemini models remain my favorites: for their speed, price, and versatility, espe­cially in visual tasks. Keep in mind that I’m using these models pro­gram­mat­i­cally in bigger systems, rather than yap­ping with them — although I think Gemini is a fine yapper, too.

As Anthropic and OpenAI lean HARD into the coding agent thing — tuning their models heavily for the task — Google con­tinues to expand and refine a flexible … dare I say general … intelligence.

P.S. However, let me add, the sudden dep­re­ca­tion of Gemini 3 Pro is annoying and irresponsible. This isn’t just a Google thing, although this model’s exis­tence was notably mayfly; there is no telling if or when any model you depend on will be yanked away. Even if the replace­ment is “better” according to many benchmarks, it might also con­tain unpre­dictable regres­sions along subtle dimensions. (You can browse the responses to Google’s announcement for examples.)

This issue is totally resolved if you host a model yourself, of course, but there aren’t yet any self-hosted models with Gemini’s visual acuity. I do expect that to change, before too long.