[HarHarVeryFunny]

Has Google even being trying to keep up with frontier sized models, and for that matter why should they?! Even if they want to, what's the rush? Someone from Google just tweeted today that they just recently STARTED their "Gemini 4" (whatever that may be) pre-training run... In the meantime they just today announced financial results with cloud revenue up 82% YOY ... they seem to be doing just fine.

[spwa4]

Let's put it this way. The Q&A on the earnings call yesterday, or about 50% of it went like this:

Bank 1> What is Google going to do about not having a SOTA model?

Sundar> Everyone uses Gemini 3.6 Flash anyway. We do that internally as well.

Bank 2> What is Google going to do about not having a SOTA model?

Sundar> Flash is great. We've started our most ambitious training run with Gemini 4.

Bank 3> What is Google going to do about not having a SOTA model?

Seriously, like 4 banks in a row, same principle. I'll look up the exact wording in the transcript, but for now it's not available and I'm not listening to the 20 minutes of that repeat again.

As for your question: Google is training a new major version of Gemini, so yes, Google is trying to get a SOTA model. They've just not succeeded for a while.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

OK, so Wall St apparently want Google to get into the (as yet unprofitable) frontier LLM competition. But why? To help any of Google's existing businesses? (doesn't make sense - the smaller much more efficient Gemini 3.6 Flash is much better suited to that).

Now, Google DeepMind is still very much pursuing AGI, and do see an LLM as being a component of that, so that's at least one area where it might make sense for Google to invest in a frontier LLM, but otherwise ???

Why aren't Wall St clamoring for Google to get back into robotics to compete with Tesla, or maybe to get into the rocket business to compete in the "data centers in space" business, or maybe get into the dry cake mix business to compete with Sara Lee ? ...

[spwa4]

I have the same question you have. WHY? Why does it matter so enormously to have a SOTA model? I don't understand. Clearly Citibank, Barclays, Wells Fargo and another already know but yeah, I don't understand.